Lisa M. McTeague, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and an assistant professor in the Brain Stimulation Laboratory of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). She earned her bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and her doctoral degree from University of Florida. Prior to joining the MUSC faculty in fall 2014, she was faculty in the UF Department of Clinical & Health Psychology and the Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention as well as the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Funded by a NIMH K23 award she is working to develop neurocircuit-informed treatment adjuncts for cognitive-behavioral approaches for PTSD, targeting deficits demonstrated in experimental affective neuroscience. While her current work is focused on PTSD, the aim is purposefully transdiagnostic—with implications for highly related anxiety and mood disorders and trauma exposure. Specifically, her work utilizes transcranial magnetic stimulation, concurrent with fMRI, as a causal probe of neural network integrity and susceptibility to perturbation in chronic and refractory anxiety and depression. The current focus is to garner pilot data and essential guidance on the feasibility of using TMS to modify neurocircuits. In the service of optimizing and personalizing care, the long-term the aim is to “rescue” deficient emotion reactivity and regulation by exogenously targeting these circuits as a preamble to cognitive-behavioral treatment.

Depression, Healthy Volunteer Studies, Anxiety, Brain