Helen S. Mayberg MD

Dr. Mayberg received a BA in psychobiology from University of California, Los Angeles and an MD from University of Southern California. She is a Board Certified Neurologist, trained at the Neurological Institute of NY at Columbia University and a post-doctoral fellowship in Nuclear Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.

Dr Mayberg heads a multidisciplinary depression research program dedicated to the study of brain circuits in depression and the effects of various antidepressant treatments measured using a variety of functional and structural imaging tools. The primary focus of the lab to development imaging and physiological based algorithms that will discriminate depressed patient subgroups and optimize treatment selection at all stages of the illness. Imaging findings provided the foundation for development and testing of deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subcallosal cingulate region (Area 25), a novel intervention for patients with treatment resistant depression.

She was recently named as one of Emory University’s “Game Changers” in recognition of her pioneering DBS research which has been heralded as a one of the first hypothesis-driven treatment strategies for a major mental illness. Clinical trials are now ongoing in both North America and Europe. At Emory, DBS studies aim to refine, optimize and extend the potential of this treatment strategy with experiments designed to characterize and define mechanisms mediating DBS response and to develop biomarkers that will improve patient selection, enhance precision of surgical targeting and optimize stimulation parameters.