Brianna Cairney

Bri Cairney, PhD, is the Administrative Director of the Center for Brain and Mind Health, where she partners with leadership to advance the Center’s mission and strategic growth. In this role, she helps shape and implement interdisciplinary team-science initiatives that foster collaboration within the clinical neuroscience research community at Yale. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Bri earned her BA in Psychology from the University of Washington and completed a post-baccalaureate research fellowship to study social cognition and sensory processing in autism using electroencephalography and eye-tracking methodologies. She completed her PhD at Louisiana State University, where her research examined the influence of co-speech gesture on cognitive mechanisms related to multimodal communication. During postdoctoral training in the McPartland Lab at Yale, she developed a novel large language model approach to detect and quantify unconventional language use among autistic speakers.