Maria Ironside, DPhil
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Scientific Background
Dr. Ironside received her Bachelor’s degree from Trinity College Dublin in 2004. After some time working in the public sector in London she subsequently completed two Master’s degrees in Cognitive and Decision Sciences and Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London and Birkbeck. It was there that she began working with neuromodulation under the supervision of Dr. Vincent Walsh at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. She then completed her doctorate in Psychiatry at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Dr. Catherine Harmer (Dept. Psychiatry) and Dr. Jacinta O’Shea (Nuffield Dept of Clinical Neurosciences). Her doctoral work applied neuromodulation to models of acute effects typically used in psychopharmacology, using behavioral and functional imaging measures and has been published in Biological Psychiatry and JAMA Psychiatry.
Dr. Ironside next completed a postdoctoral fellowship at McLean Hospital/ Harvard Medical School, under the mentorship of Dr. Diego Pizzagalli. During this fellowship she led two large clinical multimodal neuroimaging studies in major depression, examining sex differences and effects of stress in current and remitted depression. During this time she also worked on a cross-species investigation of approach-avoidance-conflict in major depressive disorder, in collaboration with Ann Graybiel’s non-human primate lab at MIT. In 2018 Dr. Ironside was awarded a Rappaport Mental Health Award to continue her neuromodulation work in patients and was promoted to Instructor/Assistant Neuroscientist by Harvard Medical School/McLean.
Dr. Ironside recently made the move to LIBR, to start a position as an Associate Investigator. She is continuing her work on the acute mechanisms of prefrontal neuromodulation with a view to carrying out mechanistic clinical trials of neuromodulation treatment in psychiatry.
Dr. Ironside next completed a postdoctoral fellowship at McLean Hospital/ Harvard Medical School, under the mentorship of Dr. Diego Pizzagalli. During this fellowship she led two large clinical multimodal neuroimaging studies in major depression, examining sex differences and effects of stress in current and remitted depression. During this time she also worked on a cross-species investigation of approach-avoidance-conflict in major depressive disorder, in collaboration with Ann Graybiel’s non-human primate lab at MIT. In 2018 Dr. Ironside was awarded a Rappaport Mental Health Award to continue her neuromodulation work in patients and was promoted to Instructor/Assistant Neuroscientist by Harvard Medical School/McLean.
Dr. Ironside recently made the move to LIBR, to start a position as an Associate Investigator. She is continuing her work on the acute mechanisms of prefrontal neuromodulation with a view to carrying out mechanistic clinical trials of neuromodulation treatment in psychiatry.
Lab Members
Cheldyn Ramsey
Research Assistant |
Ebony Walker
Research Assistant |
Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS)
The Ironside lab will be using tDCS in our upcoming study of threat sensitivity in anxious depression.
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Selected Publications
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Ironside, M., Amemori, K. I., McGrath, C. L., Pedersen, M. L., Kang, M. S., Amemori, S., ... & Pizzagalli, D. A. (2020). Approach-avoidance conflict in major depressive disorder: congruent neural findings in humans and nonhuman primates. Biological Psychiatry, 87(5), 399-408
Ironside, M., Admon, R., Maddox, S. A., Mehta, M., Douglas, S., Olson, D. P., & Pizzagalli, D. A. (2019). Inflammation and depressive phenotypes: evidence from medical records from over 12 000 patients and brain morphology. Psychological Medicine, 1-9
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Esmaeilpour, Z., Shereen, A. D., Ghobadi‐Azbari, P., Datta, A., Woods, A. J., Ironside, M., ... & Ekhtiari, H. (2020). Methodology for tDCS integration with fMRI. Human Brain Mapping, 41(7), 1950-1967
Ironside, M., Kumar, P., Kang, M. S., & Pizzagalli, D. A. (2018). Brain mechanisms mediating effects of stress on reward sensitivity. Current opinion in behavioral sciences, 22, 106-113
Ironside, M., O’Shea, J., Cowen, P. J., & Harmer, C. J. (2016). Frontal cortex stimulation reduces vigilance to threat: implications for the treatment of depression and anxiety. Biological psychiatry, 79(10), 823-830
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Ironside, M., Browning, M., Ansari, T. L., Harvey, C. J., Sekyi-Djan, M. N., Bishop, S. J., ... & O'Shea, J. (2019). Effect of prefrontal cortex stimulation on regulation of amygdala response to threat in individuals with trait anxiety: a randomized clinical trial. JAMA psychiatry, 76(1), 71-78
Ironside, M., & Perlo, S. (2018). Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation for the Treatment of Depression: a Review of the Candidate Mechanisms of Action. Current Behavioral Neuroscience Reports, 5(1), 26-35
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