.png)
Meet the Team
Dr. Sheila Shanmugan is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry, Obstetrics/Gynecology, and Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. She is also a Reproductive Psychiatrist and is the Director of research at the Penn Center for Women's Behavioral Wellness. She completed her medical, graduate, and postdoctoral training at Penn. During her PhD, she worked with Dr. Neill Epperson, and during her postdoc, she worked with Dr. Ted Satterthwaite. Dr. Shanmugan's work leverages multi-modal neuroimaging, clinical data science, and hormone administration paradigms to understand mechanisms underlying sex differences in psychopathology and identify neuroendocrinologic markers of risk vs. resilience for psychiatric disorders. The goal of her work is to use this information to personalize early interventions in reproductive psychiatry. She has received multiple prestigious awards for her research including the NIH Director's DP5 Early Independence Award, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Medical Scientists, and a Brain and Behavior Research Foundation Young Investigator Award. Dr. Shanmugan is also a Reproductive Psychiatrist and her clinical expertise includes perinatal and postpartum psychiatric disorders, perimenopausal mood disorders and cognitive dysfunction, menopausal hormone therapy, and premenstrual dysphoric disorder. She precepts the Women's Mental Health Clinic at Penn, during which she supervises senior resident physicians who treat patients with hormone-related psychiatric symptoms. She is also a dedicated teacher, and in 2021, she founded Penn's Women's Mental Health Certificate Program, a curriculum consisting of clinical experiences, expert mentorship, focused didactics, and research pursuits by which psychiatry residents can obtain specialized training in reproductive psychiatry. She continues to direct and serve as a mentor for this program.
Laura's fascination with the brain began as an undergraduate studying psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she was introduced to the field of cognitive neuroscience and human brain imaging. This, paired with her interests in sex differences and women's health, led her to Dr. Emily Jacobs' lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Over the course of her PhD, she designed and led precision imaging studies linking sex steroid hormones to human brain structure and function. Now as a postdoc supported by a National Institutes of Health K00, Laura works to apply advanced computational methods to multi-modal brain imaging data to comprehensively map the brain's response to critical endocrine transition periods (e.g., puberty, pregnancy, menopause) over the lifespan. Her ultimate pursuit is to establish endocrine drivers of vulnerability for neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases that disproportionately burden women.
Ashley Francisco is a computer science masters student at the University of Pennsylvania. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Computer Science modified with Neuroscience from Dartmouth College where she also spent her time doing research with the Dartmouth Institute in learning how to use machine learning to predict heart attack readmissions from clinical data. She also completed internships at the University of Pennsylvania that allowed her to use machine learning to predict Alzheimer's disease states from multi-modal data. Additionally, she worked in industry as a software engineer within the healthcare tech field. Ashley is interested in the intersection of technology and mental health and is currently working as a data analyst for Dr. Sheila Shanmugan's lab.
Emily Beydler (she/her) is a PGY2 psychiatry resident at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to earning her M.D. at the University of Florida College of Medicine, she studied neuroscience and biochemistry at the college of William and Mary. She spent her gap years as a research fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health, where she studied circuit-based and neurosteroid therapeutics for anxiety disorders. As a medical student, she recognized her passion for caring for patients across the reproductive lifespan. Her interests lie at the intersection of neuropsychiatry and reproductive psychiatry, with a particular focus on pre-clinical markers of postpartum depression.
Isa is a recent graduate from the University of Minnesota, where she graduated magna cum laude with a BS in Psychology. She completed her honors thesis investigating sex differences in functional brain network topography under Dr. Damien Fair. She also worked in a lab focusing on cognition and neurodevelopmental studies, as well as a lab investigating pain among children and adults with significant cognitive impairments and associated developmental disabilities. She plans to pursue a PhD, utilizing neuroimaging techniques to further understand the female brain during periods of significant development.
.png)
