For our May session on the 29th, we will be hosting Nicole Provenza and Martijn Figee.

Nicole Provenza, PhD, is an assistant professor and McNair Scholar in the Department of Neurosurgery at the Baylor College of Medicine. Her research interests are in studying the neurophysiology underlying cognition and emotion and the effects of neuromodulation on neural activity and behavior. The Provenza lab uses multimodal monitoring to link symptoms to observable, quantifiable behaviors, and to further investigate ethologically relevant brain-behavior relationships underlying psychiatric symptoms to develop personalized neuromodulation stratefies that will improve outcomes for psychiatric disorders.The title of her talk wll be “Neuromodulation, Neural Variability, and Mental Health”.

Dr. Martijn Figee, MD, PhD, is a psychiatrist and professor of Psychiatry, Neurosurgery, and Neuroscience at the Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics (C-ACT). His research centers on the role of reward and mood-related brain circuits in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), depression, and Parkinson’s disease, primarily using deep brain stimulation (DBS) as a tool of investigation. Dr. Figee is widely recognized for his involvement in the first application of fMRI in individuals with implanted DBS devices. His work aims to advance DBS and other neuromodulation techniques as therapeutic interventions for neuropsychiatric conditions, with a focus on understanding their impact across diagnostic categories and underlying neural networks. The title of his talk is “Evolution Towards Circuit Precision DBS for OCD.”