Elvisha Dhamala is the inaugural awardee of the Kavli Postdoctoral Award for Academic Diversity. Her project focused on characterizing sex differences in the neurobiological underpinnings of behavioral phenotypes. She developed expertise in brain-based predictive modeling, a machine learning framework that allows to capture robust and reliable associations between brain-derived measures and behavioral phenotypes. She recently demonstrated that sex and gender have unique influences on functional brain networks. Because social identities (e.g., sex, gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status) influence brain and behavior, she believes that aspects of biomedical research such as participant recruitment, data acquisition, and data analysis can be improved to facilitate more inclusive analyses across populations with intersectional identities. Dr. Dhamala is currently an assistant professor at Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, where her lab studies the influences of sex and gender on neurobiology and behavior across healthy and psychiatric populations.

This article is part of a special series highlighting the impact of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience at Yale. The series will be published ahead of the Kavli 20th Anniversary Symposium, taking place on Friday, September 20th in TAC.