2017-2018 McLean Fellowship Awardees Announced

McLean Hospital has announced the recipients of 14 fellowships for the 2017-2018 academic year. These fellowships are made possible through a combination of generous support from donors and internal funding resources.

The hospital is grateful to its donors, whose philanthropic investments exemplify their trust in the talented investigators listed below who are helping to advance the field of mental health research and treatment.

Mary Kathryn (Kate) Dahlgren has been awarded the Rossano Mind, Brain & Behavior Pre-Doctoral Summer Fellowship, established by honorary trustee Kenneth R. Rossano in 2003, to study the residual effects of marijuana use on driving, in the absence of acute intoxication.

Robert Fenster, MD, PhD, and Rachel A. Ross, MD, PhD, both have been awarded a Maria Lorenz Pope Fellowship. Fenster will use the fellowship to support his work on improving the understanding and treatment of early life stress, and Ross will use her award to support research on determining whether certain neurons in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex can direct feeding decisions in a mouse model.

Natalia V. Luchkina, PhD, and Galen Missig, PhD, both have been awarded a Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Mental Health Research Fellowship, established by the Rappaport family in 2001. Luchkina is working on determining how neuronal synaptic and circuit-level mechanisms encode fear and extinction memories, and Missig is researching the mechanisms of how autoimmune-related inflammation during pregnancy may be associated with autism spectrum disorders.

Kristin N. Javaras, DPhil, PhD, has been awarded the Jonathan Edward Brooking Mental Health Research Fellowship, established by the Brooking family in 1985, to support her research on assessing emotional eating in an individual’s natural environment.

Maria Mavrikaki, PhD, has been awarded the Eleanor and Miles Shore Harvard Medical School Fellowship, established as part of a cooperative program between Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital, to support her research on the effects of stress- and sex-regulated microRNAs on gene expression.

Virginie-Anne Chouinard, MD, has been awarded the Pope-Hintz Fellowship, established by the Hintz family in 2014 and named in honor of Dr. Harrison “Skip” Pope Jr., to support her research on abnormal glucose metabolism and its possible connection to bipolar disorder.

Emily L. Belleau, PhD, has been awarded the Adam J. Corneel Young Investigator Award, established by the Corneel family in 1992, to support her research on neural functioning in female adolescents before, during, and after stress, and its connection to major depressive disorder.

Antonia V. Seligowski, a psychology intern, has been awarded the Andrew P. Merrill Memorial Research Fellowship, established by the Merrill family in 1991, to support her research to determine and validate phenotypes and biomarkers that predict treatment response among women with post-traumatic stress disorder.

In addition, McLean’s President and Psychiatrist in Chief Scott L. Rauch, MD, has awarded four researchers a McLean Presidential Fellowship—Torsten Klengel, MD, PhD, Elizabeth Olson, PhD, psychology intern Andrew Peckham, and Adam Reid, PhD.