Meet the Team
Tonya Jo Hanson White, M.D., Ph.D. is Chief of the Section on Social and Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience. Dr. White has an eclectic background as a researcher at the intersection between a number of different disciplines. These disciplines include engineering and medicine; pediatrics and child/adolescent psychiatry; epidemiology and developmental neuroscience.
Dr. White received a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering (Magna Cum Laude) from the University of Utah and a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana. Overlapping graduate school with medical studies, she received her medical degree from the University of Illinois College of Medicine (James Scholar) after which she completed a combined residency in Pediatrics, Psychiatry, and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (Triple Board Program) at the University of Utah.
Following residency training, Dr. White spent a few years running a consultation/liaison child and adolescent psychiatry program at the Creighton/Nebraska Department of Psychiatry, before leaving to pursue a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Iowa under the mentorship of Nancy Andreasen, M.D., Ph.D.
She completed her postdoctoral research fellowship in 2001 and took a junior faculty position at the University of Minnesota, where she developed a joint research/clinical program in youth psychosis. In 2005, after being awarded a K08 award, she started work on a Ph.D. in bioengineering at the University of Minnesota. After moving to the Netherlands in 2009, she transferred her credits and completed her Ph.D. at the Erasmus University in the Netherlands in 2010.
She moved to the Erasmus University Medical Center in August of 2009 to build and direct a pediatric population-based neuroimaging program within the Generation R Study, which was a large epidemiological birth cohort which began in 2002. The neuroimaging program she set up was very successful, and by the time she moved to the National Institutes of Health, the program had collected more than 9000 magnetic resonance imaging scans in four waves of data collection. She left her 'leerstoel' (Professor of Pediatric Population Neuroimaging) at the Erasmus in July 2022 to join the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), where she currently heads the Section on Social and Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience (SoCoDeN).
Dr. White has over 300 publications and has received several different awards, including the Outstanding James Scholar Award from the University of Illinois College of Medicine, the Kempf Fund Award for Research Development in Psychobiological Psychiatry from the American Psychiatric Association, the 2016 Editor's Choice Award from the Journal Human Brain Mapping, and the 2024 Norbert and Charlotte Rieger Award for Scientific Achievement from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
Between 2017 and 2022, she served as a deputy editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and continues to serve as a consulting editor. She has had several positions within the Organization of Human Brain Mapping, including secretary of council and editor-in-chief of Aperture Neuro. She also has served on the Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee of the US Food and Drug Administration.
Luke Norman, Ph.D. graduated in 2017 with a P.D. from King's College London, completed his postdoctoral training at the University of Michigan, and is currently a staff scientist with the SoCoDeN team. Dr. Norman’s research leverages functional neuroimaging, with a strong emphasis on big data and meta-/mega-analytic approaches, to investigate childhood neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions, including ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, and pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Jessica Ouyang, M.D. is a staff clinician for the Section on Social and Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience. Prior to NIMH, Dr. Ouyang worked as a clinical psychiatrist for more than 4 years with experience in integrated care in primary care, consult liaison psychiatry, outpatient child and adolescent psychiatry, group therapy, and teaching and advising trainees (medical students, residents, and fellows). She is a member of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, where she is actively involved in the early childhood/infant mental health committee and Asian American mental health efforts.
She holds a Bachelor of Science in Bioengineering from the University of California at Berkeley and received her medical degree from Saint Louis University. In 2019, she graduated from the combined pediatrics, general psychiatry, and child & adolescent psychiatry program at Indiana University in Indianapolis, IN. In 2020, she completed the Women’s Mental Health fellowship with focus on the perinatal period and early attachment at Warren Alpert School of Medicine in Providence, RI.
In her free time, she enjoys traveling and making new friends around the world, eating (6 years and counting on Yelp Elite), socializing, staying active both physically and in her community. She also dabbles in watercolor, cooking, connecting with others, and learning random things from YouTube University.
Neda Sadeghi, Ph.D. is a neuroimaging scientist in the Section on Social and Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience. Dr. Sadeghi completed her Ph.D. in bioengineering at the University of Utah with a focus on early brain development. Dr. Sadeghi's neuroimaging research spans more than 15 years, involving subjects of different age groups, and patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders.
Dr. Sadeghi is passionate about leveraging the power of novel image analysis techniques and machine learning algorithms combined with longitudinal designs to improve our understanding of typical brain development, as well as differences arising from atypical development and their underlying mechanisms with a keen interest on the individual level predictions. She has also developed tools such as diffusion tensor-based morphometry that has been utilized to study conditions such as Down syndrome, traumatic brain injury, Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia, Moebius Syndrome, and atypical development.
Saadia Choudhury M.A. joined NIH in 2013 as a Clinical Research and Patient Coordinator in the National Human Genome Research Institute's (NHGRI) Social and Behavioral Research Branch. She joined the Section on Social and Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience at the National Institute of Mental Health in October 2024. Prior to joining the National Institutes of Heath, Saadia was the Research Coordinator at Johns Hopkins University for more than a decade, managing clinical studies, specializing in neuropsychological assessments and patient recruitment. Her work has involved recruiting, screening, enrolling, and testing over 1,000 participants of all ages across multiple studies on ADHD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a virtual reality-based cognitive trial.
Saadia greatly enjoys working with children of all ages and fully appreciates each child's unique challenge. She feels that it has enhanced both her professional and personal skills of patience and communication. Saadia looks forward to continuing her work coordinating pediatric research at SoCoDeN in the NIMH.
Jenny Jean M.D. is a clinical research fellow in the Section on Social and Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience. During her time at NIMH, Dr. Jean has focused on mapping brain development using longitudinal neuroanatomic data, exploring ADHD genomics, and examining the factors and mechanisms underpinning ADHD symptom trajectories starting from childhood. She is passionate about child psychiatry and exploring the phenomenological experience of autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, and OCD at the intersection of elucidating the role of the cerebellum in neurodevelopmental disorders. She loves art, post-modern theory, and deconstructing psychoanalysis.
Erin Nakamura, M.P.H. is the Clinical Research Program Manager in the Section on Social and Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience (SoCoDeN). Erin joined NIMH in 2004 and coordinated a large family study of mood and anxiety disorders before becoming part of the SoCoDeN team in 2022. She has a background in psychology, epidemiology, and public health. She supports and manages the SoCoDeN clinical research program through trainings, protocol development and maintenance, and study coordination.
Wendy Sharp, LCSW-C is a licensed clinical social worker who has worked at NIH in ADHD research for more than 20 years. She has worked on longitudinal studies, twin studies, and research on obsessive-compulsive disorder and childhood-onset schizophrenia. Ms. Sharp has published in peer-reviewed journals on ADHD across the lifespan, the interplay between neighborhood and familial factors on ADHD, ADHD in girls, monozygotic twins discordant for ADHD, and brain development in children and adolescents with ADHD. She has been a guest speaker at psychiatry and psychology conferences and has spoken to national and local organizations as well as schools and parent groups on ADHD. Ms. Sharp earned her bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan and her master's degree in social work from Howard University. One of her interests is talking to children and adolescents and helping them discover their ADHD superpower.
Marine Bouyssi-Kobar, Ph.D. is a research scientist in the Section on Social and Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience. Dr. Bouyssi-Kobar completed her master's degree in biomedical engineering at Polytech Marseille (France) and her Ph.D. in Neurosciences (Molecular Medicine) at George Washington University (Washington, D.C.). Dr. Bouyssi-Kobar has more than 10 years of hands-on experience in clinical research, neuroimaging, and neurodevelopment. She adopts an interdisciplinary approach to identify how different environmental and genomic factors impact brain development in individuals with and without neurodevelopmental disorders.
Dr. Bouyssi-Kobar has investigated prenatal and early postnatal cerebral development in healthy and high-risk populations using multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques. During her postdoctoral fellowship at the National Human Genomic Research Institute (NHGRI), she focused on longitudinal brain development of structural and functional connectivity in youth with and without ADHD and its relationship with clinical phenotype and genotype. Dr. Bouyssi-Kobar's expertise extents from the earliest fetal/neonatal stage of brain development through childhood into adulthood and she is passionate about expanding our understanding of the neural mechanisms underpinning normal and atypical brain development.
Yemi Hailemariam, B.S. graduated from Brown University in 2023 with a degree in Neuroscience and Public Health. Her thesis examined how Ethiopian women experiencing domestic violence and justifying abuse predicted their children’s health outcomes such as diarrheal incidence, birthweight, and breast-feeding patterns. In the future, she plans to obtain a master’s degree in public health, concentrating in health administration and child health policy, and work on designing and managing evidence-based public health programs that support underserved families, with a focus on child development and public mental health. In her free time, Yemi enjoys reading, long walks, photography, and dancing.
Amanda Halliday, B.S. graduated from Haverford College in 2023 with a neuroscience major and a psychology minor. Her thesis used fast-scan cyclic voltammetry to investigate the effects of peripartum estradiol fluctuations on mesolimbic dopamine dynamics in mice. After her IRTA internship, she plans to pursue a medical degree and to continue conducting clinical research. In her free time, Amanda enjoys running, knitting, playing the piano, and baking bread.
Kaylee McDonald, B.A. graduated from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 2023 with a degree in psychology and a minor in music. At UMBC, she was the lead research assistant in the pediatrics lab, which focused on using VR technology to artificially increase acute pain tolerance in children. She has presented several posters at conferences, including How Avoidant and Restrictive Food Behaviors Negatively Affect Pediatric Mental Health and The Effect of Selective Attention on Pain Tolerance in Children. Prior to the NIMH, Kaylee worked as a Registered Behavioral Technician (RBT) with autistic children, which focused on improving their executive functioning and self-help skills. After her IRTA internship, Kaylee intends to pursue a Ph.D./Psy.D.in Clinical Psychology. Outside of the lab, Kaylee performs in community theater and fosters kittens from the local shelter.
Ale Mendoza Pardo, B.S. graduated from Yale University in 2023 with a degree in neuroscience while studying on the pre-med track. At Yale, she conducted her thesis research on the effects of meditation on the most common symptoms of schizophrenia, with a focus on mindfulness meditation. In her free time, Ale enjoys listening to podcasts, crocheting and knitting, running, and hanging out with her dog. After her time at the NIH, Ale plans to go to medical school and study pediatric psychiatry and OB/GYN.
Michelle Olofsson, B.Sc. is a Ph.D. student with the NIH-KI Graduate Partnerships Program in Clinical Neuroscience under the mentorship of Dr. Tonya White (NIMH), Dr. Predrag Petrovic (KI), and Dr. Alexander Lebedev (KI). Before joining the program, Michelle received her B.Sc. in medical biosciences from Imperial College London. Michelle has a background in data analysis and epidemiological research, with her undergraduate thesis evaluating patterns of palliative radiotherapy care on a national level in England. At the NIH and KI, Michelle will be applying her background to the study of psychedelic use and its effects on mental health in individuals with a history of childhood trauma.
Juanse Parra, B.A. graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 2023 with a degree in cognitive science, specializing in linguistics and neuroscience. His research background has focused on dementia, language disorders, and currently, ADHD in children. Passionate about neurological disorders, Juanse seeks to apply his data analytics skills to uncover new insights into children's developmental patterns and improve techniques for understanding their growth.
Liam Swiggard, B.A. graduated from Clark University with a degree in Psychology and a minor in Mathematics. In his honors thesis, Liam studied how children express and respond to social norms through play behavior. Following his time in the SoCoDeN, Liam plans to pursue a degree in Clinical Psychology. Liam enjoys theatre and going to museums.
Sam Vucic, B.A. graduated from Cornell University in 2023, earning a B.A. in psychology with a concentration in behavioral and evolutionary neuroscience, and a minor in philosophy. In his Cornell research, he explored the neurobiological mechanisms of different types of learning and memory in rodents and birds. His mental health work occupied a great deal of his attention at Cornell, with experiences in social work with adolescents and projective play therapy with children. Sam is very interested in enhancing our neurobiological and clinical understanding of mental health, and moreover, our ability to effectively treat mental health disorders. Out of this motivation, he hopes to pursue either a clinical Ph.D. in psychology or an M.D./Ph.D. degree. Outside of the lab he loves spending time in nature, cycling, and reading literature.