Sarah Syed

I'm a clinical research assistant in the Laboratory for Affective and Translational Neuroscience at McLean Hospital / Harvard Medical School, where I work with Diego A. Pizzagalli on an NIMH-funded study of early life stress and depression. I also support coordination of two NIMH-funded implementation trials at the OCD Institute's Office of Clinical Assessment and Research with Martha J. Falkenstein.

I graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University with a BS in Psychology and a BA in Community Health. I'm currently applying to clinical psychology PhD programs.

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Research Interests

I study how early life stress and childhood maltreatment intersect with minoritized identity to shape risk for depression and psychiatric crisis. My goal is to connect neurobiological and structural mechanisms with real-world clinical and health systems research, in service of better identification, prevention, and intervention for at-risk populations.

Concretely, I work across three lines of research:

Neurobiology of stress and depression. Structural and functional MRI, magnetic resonance spectroscopy, brain-age modeling, and salivary cortisol and immuno-oxidative stress markers, to study how the timing and severity of childhood maltreatment shape reward processing and accelerated brain aging in major depressive disorder.
Psychiatric emergency care and disparities. Large-scale electronic health record and survey data to examine racial and ethnic disparities in diagnosis, encounter setting, and discharge disposition within psychiatric emergency systems, with a focus on Asian American and other minoritized populations.
Clinical translation and implementation. Adapting and testing scalable digital interventions (e.g., cognitive bias modification for OCD, single-session interventions for postpartum intrusive thoughts) using frameworks like FRAME and ADAPT to bridge mechanistic research with accessible clinical care.

Publications

Peer-reviewed work below; highlighted entries are ones I led. Google Scholar

How LGBTQ+ youth of color experience identity-based discrimination in mental health care settings.

A commentary reframing reward dysfunction (e.g., anhedonia) as a temporally organized process rather than a single static deficit, breaking reward-related behavior down into stages (memory-derived value, incentive salience, anticipated pleasure, effort valuation, hedonic impact, outcome evaluation, value updating, and habitual control) that can each break down differently across depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and addiction, with implications for how motivation and pleasure deficits are measured and targeted in treatment.

How patients of different racial and ethnic backgrounds move through the distinct care channels of a psychiatric emergency services program.

Analyzed nearly three years of clinical notes (4,111 encounters, 2019–2022) from the Boston Police Department's co-response program using an inductive, grounded-theory approach. Found that behavioral health professionals interact with a wide range of community members (police, individuals in crisis, family, providers), assess behavioral health symptoms and risk in the field, and provide clinical, police-facing, and general supports. Together, these findings form a conceptual framework suggesting mechanisms by which co-response programs can reduce reliance on the criminal justice system for behavioral health crises.

Retrospective review of 227,553 psychiatric emergency encounters (2005–2020) found that adults experiencing homelessness (AEH) accounted for a rising share of visits (from 23.3% in 2005 to 41.6% in 2020), with the proportion of AEH aged 55+ more than tripling (4.2% to 15.4%) and over six times the odds of being high-frequency utilizers (10+ visits/year) compared to housed adults, supporting interventions that address housing access directly within emergency encounters.

Under Review & In Preparation

Across two samples of women with childhood sexual abuse histories, MRI-derived brain age gap tracked maltreatment severity only among women with current MDD, and the direction flipped depending on developmental timing (negative association after early-childhood abuse, positive after later abuse/adolescence). Depression severity, conversely, predicted brain age gap only in women without maltreatment histories. Women with current MDD and abuse histories also showed heightened, prolonged cortisol responses to acute stress, with nonlinear (inverted U-shaped) links to brain age gap. Together, this suggests brain age gap is not a simple biomarker of depression, but reflects how maltreatment timing, current clinical state, and stress physiology jointly shape biological aging.

EHR study of 101,093 encounters (38,170 individuals; 1,260 API) in an urban safety-net psychiatric emergency program. Relative to several non-API comparison groups, API adults and youth were more likely to enter through acute settings (EDs) and less likely through lower-intensity settings (UCCs, home, telehealth); API patients had markedly elevated odds of psychosis diagnoses despite population-level data showing lower psychosis prevalence among Asian Americans; and API patients were more likely to be discharged to inpatient care and less likely to outpatient referral. I developed the research questions and led every phase from conceptualization through manuscript preparation.

Study linking glutamatergic and immuno-oxidative stress markers in major depressive disorder to the developmental timing and cumulative burden of early adversity.

How adult attachment style relates to fronto-limbic brain structure in women with depressive symptoms and histories of childhood sexual abuse.

Thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with youth of color, guardians, and clinicians about how decisions actually get made during a psychiatric emergency visit.

Selected Presentations

Nine posters and three talks in total; the ones I presented are below. Full list in my CV.

Student Poster Award winner, selected by the SPP board.

Research Experience

I independently direct day-to-day operations of the NIH-funded R01 Early Life Stress and Depression (MH095809), which uses fMRI, MRS, and behavioral tasks to study mechanisms linking childhood sexual abuse to major depressive disorder. I manage the full participant pipeline for adults with current and remitted MDD: phone screening (560+), informed consent (60+), clinical assessment, and 6- and 12-month follow-up (35+); independently process and bank biospecimens (saliva and blood; 140+); lead statistical analyses integrating multimodal data that have informed 2 first-author manuscripts and 2 first-author posters; serve as primary IRB regulatory contact (45+ amendments); and recruit, train, and supervise 10+ research assistants and volunteers.

I coordinate two NIH-funded hybrid type 1 effectiveness-implementation trials: a smartphone-based Cognitive Bias Modification for Interpretation (CBM-I) program targeting interpretation bias in OCD (K23MH126193), and an intervention for postpartum intrusive thoughts (R01MH146063). I consent and manage the full participant timeline for the CBM-I trial's waitlist arm, delivering up to 8 training sessions per participant; co-lead qualitative analysis of stakeholder exit interviews (n=20), building a 64-code codebook across a 3-person coding team; and lead adaptation of a single-session postpartum intervention using the FRAME and ADAPT frameworks.

I first-authored a study of encounter setting, diagnosis, and discharge disposition among Asian American adults and youth in a psychiatric emergency EHR database (N=38,170), leading every phase from research question through submission. I led NVivo thematic analysis of 18 interviews with youth of color and guardians for the NIMH-funded Youth in Emergency Study (R36MH126473), yielding 2 manuscripts in revision; recruited and consented participants (50+) across 3 studies, screening by chart review (100+); and contributed to 3 further published manuscripts on disparities in emergency psychiatric care.

I authored literature reviews shaping study design for a published manuscript; led recruitment and consent (30+) of individuals with active psychotic symptoms across clinical settings, adapting communication for participants with limited decisional clarity; and managed systematic chart review (205+) and longitudinal data quality control for the Massachusetts Psychosis Network Treatment Battery.

I administered structured psychiatric assessments (PHQ-9, GAI, HSCL-25, WHODAS, PCL-5, MoCA) by phone (35+) at 6- and 12-month follow-up for the Positive Minds–Strong Bodies RCT, a combined psychoeducational and exercise intervention for minority and immigrant older adults.

My senior thesis, Prejudice and Bias Awareness in Anticipated Interracial Interactions, examined how symbolic racism and bias awareness shape anticipated interracial anxiety among people of color. I designed a Qualtrics paradigm using deception to capture emotional shifts during anticipated cross-racial interaction, secured the IRB protocol and debriefing plan, ran linear regressions in R, and built a 77-code qualitative framework in NVivo. Graduated with high honors.

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