Maria de las Mercedes Perez-Rodriguez, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Director, Medical Student Clerkship
Associate Director, Medical Student Education
Assistant Training Director for Research
Medical Director and Director of Research Training, Psychosis Research Program (Critical Connections)
Social Cognition Section Co-Chief, Center for Affective Neuroscience
Mercedes.perez@mssm.edu
Dr. Perez’s work, funded by the NIH, the CDC, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (NARSAD), the VA MIRECC, and industry collaborations, aims to elucidate the neurobiological underpinnings of risk and resilience to psychosis spectrum and trauma-related disorders, with a focus on cognition and social cognition. The goal of Dr. Perez’s lab is to develop and test new treatments for psychosis spectrum and trauma-related disorders informed by the neurobiology of the cognitive and social cognitive impairments commonly present in these disorders.
Dr. Perez has authored or co-authored over 100 publications, including more than 70 papers in in peer-reviewed journals and 15 book chapters.
As Assistant Training Director for Research and Director of the Medical Student Clerkship, Dr. Perez plays a key role in educating and mentoring medical students and residents at Mount Sinai. She co-directs the NIMH R25-supported Combined Psychiatry Residency and PhD Program, the Physician-Scientists Psychiatry Residency Research Track, and the NIMH-funded T32 “Training the New Generation of Clinical Neuroscientists” at Mount Sinai.
Her commitment to training the next generation of physician-scientists has been recognized with her appointment to the AAMC Committee on Creating a Physician-Scientist Training and Career Development Home and as Core Faculty of the NIMH-funded Career Development Institute for Psychiatry. Dr. Perez is a Friedman Brain Institute Research Scholar and a Faculty Scholar at Mount Sinai’s Center for Multicultural and Community Affairs, which focuses on fostering diversity in our clinical and research workforce.
Dr. Perez is a Fellow Member of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), a Member of the American College of Psychiatrists (ACP), a Member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP), and an elected member of the board of directors of the American Society of Hispanic Psychiatry.
Clinical Research Coordinator:
Emma C. Smith
Clinical Research Coordinator for Affective and Cognitive Therapeutics (ACT)
Database Manager for Mood and Personality Disorder Research Lab
Department of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine Mount Sinai
Emma Smith received her B.A. in Behavioral Neuroscience of Psychology from Fairfield University in May 2019 and she is the current clinical research coordinator and database manager for the Affective and Cognitive Therapeutics (ACT) and Mood and Personality Disorder research labs. She has managed lab projects such as Examining Dose-Related Effects of Oxytocin on Social Cognition across Populations, Assessment of the Feasibility and Usability of the AiCure Platform in Subjects with Schizophrenia, Examining Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF) Biomarkers of Mother-Infant Social Behavior, Understanding Symptoms and Cognitive Impairment in Psychiatric Disorders: An RDoC Approach, and Transdiagnostic Impact of Covid-19 on psychological wellbeing, functioning, and access to essential needs. Emma plans to pursue a PhD in Clinical Psychology with an interest in general and social cognitive functioning and negative symptoms in psychosis spectrum disorders.
Elizabeth Ramjas
Elizabeth.ramjas@mssm.edu
Elizabeth Ramjas, M.A. is a per-diem research coordinator at the Mood and PD Program. She is a 6th year doctoral student in Clinical Psychology at Hofstra University and is currently completing her doctoral internship at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center.
Danielle Torres
Collaborators
Caridad Benavides
Caridad Benavides, is a MD, PhD candidate who worked as Program director for both CUE Icahn and CUE St. Luke’s at Mount Sinai. Dr. Benavides completed her Psychiatry residency training in Europe, worked as a Psychiatrist in Spain in specialized continuing care teams for prevention and early intervention in psychosis, helping young adults in Australia and Spain. Dr. Benavides then went on to complete a research postdoctoral fellowship in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Columbia University. She has since been involved in important clinical neuroscience research. She is currently working in Miami, Florida, where she is pursuing her clinical residency in Psychiatry. Her current interests include neuroimaging, prevention and early intervention as well as learning the neurobiological foundations of risk and resilience in severe mental disorders.
Margaret McNamara McClure, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Dr. McNamara McClure’s doctoral training in clinical psychology placed a substantial focus on assessment of psychopathology, specifically personality pathology. In addition, she received advanced training during her post-doctoral fellowship in assessment of personality and schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Her primary research focus early in my career was working on a model relating cognitive deficits of schizophrenia spectrum disorders with functional outcomes and has continued to examine the relationship between these cognitive deficits, laboratory-based assessments of real world functioning, and outcomes in several studies.
For more than a decade, Dr. McNamara McClure has supervised both the psychodiagnostic and neuropsychological assessments of participants recruited from the community in and around the Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York City. In this position she has either conducted or supervised the assessment of hundreds of participants, recruited for a variety of research projects, and have overseen the assessments of individuals with pathology ranging from personality to mood to anxiety to psychosis, as well as healthy controls. In addition, she successfully completed two clinical trials examining Cognitive Remediation Therapy and Social Cognition Training for the treatment of functional disability in patients with schizophrenia and schizotypal personality disorder (SPD
Margaret McNamara McClure, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Dr. McNamara McClure’s doctoral training in clinical psychology placed a substantial focus on assessment of psychopathology, specifically personality pathology. In addition, she received advanced training during her post-doctoral fellowship in assessment of personality and schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Her primary research focus early in my career was working on a model relating cognitive deficits of schizophrenia spectrum disorders with functional outcomes and has continued to examine the relationship between these cognitive deficits, laboratory-based assessments of real world functioning, and outcomes in several studies.
For more than a decade, Dr. McNamara McClure has supervised both the psychodiagnostic and neuropsychological assessments of participants recruited from the community in and around the Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York City. In this position she has either conducted or supervised the assessment of hundreds of participants, recruited for a variety of research projects, and have overseen the assessments of individuals with pathology ranging from personality to mood to anxiety to psychosis, as well as healthy controls. In addition, she successfully completed two clinical trials examining Cognitive Remediation Therapy and Social Cognition Training for the treatment of functional disability in patients with schizophrenia and schizotypal personality disorder (SPD
Agnes Norbury
Daniel Rosell
Jihan Ryu
Resident Psychiatrist at the Mount Sinai Morningside-West Hospitals/ISMMS
M.D., Dartmouth College
jihan.ryu@mountsinai.org
Johan’s research interest involves modeling perception, attachment, theory of mind, and social cognition on a computational level in severe mood, trauma, and personality disorders.
Rachel Kim Youngjung
Kimia Ziafat, BSc
I graduated with my BSc in Biology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in May 2020. I am currently an MSc student in Population and Public Health at UBC, in Vancouver, Canada. I have written a book chapter with Mercedes on PET and SPECT in Personality Disorders, which is currently in press at Springer publishing. My other research work and publications are mostly focused on the field of mental health and addictions. Currently, I am working part-time as a research assistant with the Addictions and Concurrent Disorders Group at the Institute of Mental Health at UBC, and also the BC Centre on Substance Use. I enjoy working with the team a lot and hope to continue my work with this lovely and positive group of researchers!
Lab Alumni
William Calabrese
Amanda Fisher
Amanda Fisher received a B.A. in psychology from New York University. Amanda worked at Mood and PD from 2015-2017 as a clinical research coordinator and database manager. During her time at Mood and PD, Amanda helped coordinate the studies Examining Dose-Related Effects of Oxytocin on Social Cognition across Populations, Mapping Oxytocin Activation Fields and Characterizing Activation Uptake Dynamics using High-latency BOLD fMRI, and A D1 Agonist for Working Memory Enhancement in the Schizophrenia. Currently, Amanda is pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at St. John’s University.
Sharely Fredtorres
Sharely was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She attended Harvard University for her Bachelor’s degree where she majored in the Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Track of Psychology. At the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Sharely was accepted to the Primary Care Scholars Program, a 4 year scholarship for students interested in providing primary care to underserved communities. In medical school, she was committed to her role as Mental Health Senior Clinician at the medical student-run free clinic and pursued a Scholarly Research Year, during which she received the NYCPS medical student grant to develop a project with her PI, Dr. Mercedes Perez-Rodriguez, investigating the effects of child trauma on social functioning in adults with schizotypal and borderline personality disorders. Sharely also collaborated with Dr. Adriana Feder on an online psychotherapy study led by the Mount Sinai World Trade Center Mental Health program for 9/11 first-responders with PTSD. Sharely is an author of several peer-reviewed publications, including a review on the neurobiology of resilience in the journal Biological Psychiatry and numerous chapters, including a first-author APA chapter publication on the neurobiology of personality disorders. Sharely’s main research interests include trauma, resilience, social cognition, and social determinants of mental health. She hopes to continue to incorporate research into her training as she currently completes her psychiatry medical residency at the Mount Sinai Hospital.
Sarah Rutter, MA
Current Clinical Research Coordinator at Depression and Anxiety Center
https://icahn.mssm.edu/research/depression-anxiety-center/faculty/team
Sarah.rutter@mssm.edu
Sarah Rutter grew up in New Jersey and received her Bachelor’s in Psychology and French from Temple University in 2014, and her Master’s in Psychology from New York University in 2017. Her graduate thesis, under the supervision of Dr. Erin Hazlett, focused on statistical models of depression severity in veterans, with a specific emphasis on childhood traumatic experiences and emotion dysregulation. At the Mood and Personality Disorders Research Program, she was the database manager and worked on many studies, including a clinical trial of DHX for cognitive impairment in schizotypal personality disorder, a clinical trial of oxytocin for social cognitive impairment in personality disorders, and several trials of digital assessments of negative symptoms in the schizophrenia spectrum. Sarah currently works at the Depression and Anxiety Center (DAC) on clinical trials of ketamine for PTSD and brain imaging studies of depression. After DAC, She plans to pursue a PhD in Clinical Psychology, focusing on the effects of traumatic or stressful life events and inflammation on the development of psychopathology.
John Samuels
Elizabeth Soto