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Profile

Jennifer Stevens PhD

  • Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
    Associate Professor
  • Emory University School of Medicine
    49 Jesse Hill Jr Dr Se c/o Grady Trauma Project
Head shot of Jennifer Stevens

Overview

Jennifer S. Stevens is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, and Co-Director of the Grady Trauma Project. She received her BS in Psychology at the University of Georgia, and PhD in Cognitive and Developmental Psychology at Emory. She uses neuroimaging approaches to probe brain function in healthy individuals, and neurobiological pathways promoting stress vulnerability or resilience. Neural circuits supporting emotional arousal and memory encoding are particularly important for adapting to trauma and other forms of environmental stress. She has investigated individual differences in these circuits in normative and trauma-exposed populations of adults and children. A second major theme of her research has been to understand sex differences in emotion-related brain function, and the brain basis of womens increased risk for trauma-related psychopathology. She addresses these questions using cognitive tasks to probe behavioral and subjective aspects of emotion and memory, and neurobiological measures such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), scalp electrophysiology, and autonomic physiological measures. Her research also combines genomics and cognitive neuroscience research to characterize stress vulnerability pathways that link SNPs, expression and methylation, neural circuits, and behavior. Her work on the effects of trauma on the brain has been continuously funded by the NIMH, DoD, and VA. Dr. Stevens is a Co-Director of the ENIGMA-PGC-PTSD Neuroimaging working group, and an Investigator at the Center for Visual and Neurocognitive Rehabilitation within the Atlanta VA Health Care System.

Academic Appointment

  • Associate Professor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory University
  • Instructor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory University, Atlanta

Education

Degrees

  • PhD from Emory University, Atlanta
  • BS from Emory University, Atlanta

Research

Publications

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