Athina Aruldass, Ph.D.
Instructor of Pharmacology, Physiology & Biophysics
Athina is an interdisciplinary neuroscientist with training spanning immunopsychiatry, neuroimaging, and multi-omics. She completed her doctoral research at the University of Cambridge, UK (2023), where she investigated links between peripheral inflammation and brain function in major depressive disorder by integrating neuroimaging with blood-based immunological data. This work provided a strong foundation in network science, multimodal data integration, and systems-level data analysis. She subsequently undertook postdoctoral training at McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School (2022–2025) in Dr. Nikolaos Daskalakis’ lab, where she expanded into systems biology approaches, including population-scale genetic studies and postmortem brain multi-omics analyses of trauma- and stress-related disorders. Athina currently continues her work under Dr. Daskalakis as a junior faculty member at Boston University (2026), where she aims to develop an independent research program at the intersection of trauma, stress, pain and addiction.
Research Interests
Athina’s research aims to understand how interactions between the brain, body, and environment shape mental health and psychiatric vulnerability. Her work focuses on combining multi-omics (genomics, transcriptomics, methylomics, proteomics), neuroimaging, and large-scale population data (e.g., electronic health records) to study the multimorbidity across peripheral and mental health. She employs machine learning and graph/network-based approaches, to integrate and interrogate high-dimensional datasets. Central to her research is the development of a ‘brain–body–behavior atlas’, a systems-level framework that captures how peripheral physiological systems – such as immune, cardiometabolic, and endocrine processes – dynamically interact with brain function across the human lifespan. She is particularly interested in the role of the exposome, including sex differences, socioeconomic, geographic and cultural factors, in shaping heterogeneity in risk and resilience. Through this integrative approach, Athina’s goal is to advance precision neuropsychiatry by improving mechanistic understanding, prediction, diagnosis, and treatment, while ensuring that research remains grounded in real-world clinical and public health contexts.