Bio
As an MD/PhD candidate at Stanford, Ellie Beam was awarded F30 grant funding by the NIMH to undertake specialized training in computational psychiatry, and she defended a PhD thesis in the Neurosciences within three years. Her thesis synthesized the texts and data of nearly 20,000 neuroimaging articles into a data-driven ontology of human brain function, forming the basis for a US patent and a first-author article in Nature Neuroscience. The idea of mapping brain function from the neuroimaging literature had been sparked a decade earlier when working directly with Professor Scott Huettel as an undergraduate at Duke to map the semantic structure of cognitive neuroscience through network analyses of article texts. Her undergraduate thesis was published as a first-author article in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience and merited Graduation with Distinction in Neuroscience. She then dedicated two post-undergraduate years to full-time research in the lab of Professor Randy Buckner at Harvard and MGH, leading a project that related executive functioning deficits to frontoparietal network disruption in young adults at risk for depression. Her predoctoral work in neuroscience and psychiatry was recognized by the Leah J. Dickstein Medical Student Award, Angier B. Duke Memorial Scholarship and Research Fellowship, and Cleveland Technical Societies Scholarship.