Aleksandr Talishinsky, PhD, received an NIH F30 research grant to support his work in the Liston Lab at Weill Cornell Graduate School. Dr. Talishinsky, who defended his thesis in October of 2021, described his research below:
"Major depressive disorder (MDD) has been cited as the leading cause of disability worldwide, affecting up to 14.2 million patients in the United States per year. Most patients experience a delay in reaching remission due to a lack of precise treatment selection methods. Our goal is to apply a biomarker-driven approach of precision medicine in psychiatry, using machine learning tools to analyze human neuroimaging and genetic data, with the clinical endpoint of shortened time to remission for MDD patients. To achieve this goal, we will develop sex-specific resting state fMRI biomarkers for MDD and determine their underlying genetic correlates. The benefit of achieving these aims will be twofold: (1) in the clinic, achieving these goals will allow for more accurate diagnostic and treatment-response predictive algorithms for MDD, to reduce time to remission in MDD patients. (2) In the laboratory, our work will bridge transcriptomic and connectomic data to guide discovery of novel sex-specific circuit mechanisms and treatments for MDD. Overall, this project will fill a substantial gap in our knowledge of sex differences in MDD functional connectivity and the underlying genetic correlates of those differences."
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