Marzieh Majd

Marzieh received her Pharm.D. degree from Tehran Azad University of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Iran and her Ph.D. in Biobehavioral Health from the Pennsylvania State University. Broadly, Marzieh is interested in understanding the underlying biology of mood disorders (with a particular interest in depression) and tailoring treatments based on combinations of biological and behavioral factors. More specifically, her research has focused on: 1) understanding the heterogeneity of depression, and 2) investigating the associations between depressive symptoms and inflammatory markers. For her Ph.D. dissertation, she measured depression-related constructs by employing a battery of questionnaires and laboratory-based tasks (e.g., the NIH toolbox cognition) and examined the inflammatory correlates of each construct. As part of her post-doctoral fellowship, she uses a complex data-driven machine learning approach to identify biological (e.g., inflammation) and psychological (e.g., depressive symptoms) predictors of complicated grief during bereavement.