Christina Ann Michel, PhD

Christina A. Michel, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Medical Neurobiology in Psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and a Research Scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. She completed her undergraduate degree at Princeton University and earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology from St. John’s University, followed by clinical psychology internship training at NYU Langone Medical Center and Bellevue Hospital and postdoctoral fellowship training at Columbia University. Dr. Michel is a licensed clinical psychologist and functional neuroimaging researcher whose clinical interests focus on mood disorders, depression, and suicide risk. Her research uses functional brain imaging approaches to better understand the neurobiology of depression and suicidality, identify neural markers that may predict response to medication and psychotherapy, and inform the development of more effective interventions. Her work integrates task-based fMRI, neural decoding, and temporal analyses to examine how brain systems involved in emotional memory, emotion regulation, and negative affect contribute to psychiatric symptoms and recovery. A central focus of her current research is understanding hippocampal and hippocampal-dependent circuit dysfunction in major depressive disorder, including whether abnormalities in these circuits are specific to acute depressive episodes or persist between episodes as markers of illness vulnerability. Her ongoing research also examines whether rapid-acting treatments, including ketamine, modulate hippocampal activity and connectivity and whether these neural changes are associated with clinical improvement.