Helen S. Mayberg is Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at Emory University School of Medicine. She received her B.A. in Psychobiology from University of California, Los Angeles and the M.D. degree from the University of Southern California. Following an internship in Internal Medicine at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, and a Residency in Neurology at the Neurological Institute, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Nuclear Medicine at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Mayberg has held academic positions at Johns Hopkins, the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio, and was the first Sandra Rotman Chair in Neuropsychiatry at the Rotman Research Institute and the University of Toronto.
The central theme of her research program is the use of functional neuroimaging methods to define critical neural pathways mediating normal and abnormal mood states in health and disease. Converging findings from a series of studies has led to a neural systems model of major depression. This model provides the foundation for ongoing experiments examining mechanisms of standard antidepressant treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy and pharmacotherapy as well as development of novel surgical interventions for treatment resistant patients. Since her move in 2004 to Atlanta, these studies have been expanded to further address neurobiological markers predicting treatment response, relapse and resistance as well as depression vulnerability, with a goal towards developing imaging-based algorithms that will discriminate patient subgroups
