Laboratory Director

Christopher Beevers, Ph.D.

Professor, The University of Texas at Austin
E-mail: beevers@utexas.edu
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4480-0902
Publications: Google Scholar

Christopher Beevers, Ph.D., director of the Mood Disorders Laboratory, received his doctorate in adult clinical psychology from the University of Miami in 2002. He completed his internship and post-doctoral training at Brown Medical School in Providence, Rhode Island and joined the psychology department at the University of Texas in January 2005. He has received the President’s New Researcher Award from the Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy and was a Beck Scholar at the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research. He is currently Associate Editor at Clinical Psychological Science and a member of several editorial boards for leading journals in his research area, including the Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Cognitive Therapy and Research. Dr. Beevers’ primary research interest focuses on the cognitive etiology and treatment of major unipolar depression. He is very interested in using experimental psychopathology methods to identify factors that maintain depression and translating these findings into effective interventions for depression and related psychopathology (e.g., anhedonia, negative affect). 

Research Faculty/Post-Docs

Jason Shumake, Ph.D.

Biostatistician / Research Assistant Professor
E-mail: shumake@utexas.edu

Jason Shumake received his doctorate in psychology from the University of Texas in 2004, with a concentration in behavioral neuroscience and a supporting portfolio in statistics and computational modeling, and he completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg, Germany, in 2007. Dr. Shumake’s primary research interest is building models from longitudinal data sets to classify and predict behavior and responses to interventions. He is excited by the advancement of personalized medicine through data science, which he believes is critical for translating prediction research into individualized treatment recommendations. He is particularly interested in using statistical and machine learning algorithms to search for novel combinations of genetic, neural, and behavioral features that predict treatment response. His current projects involve mining anatomical and functional brain imaging data, eye tracking data, and psychometric data from depressed individuals to predict longitudinal mood changes that occur both naturalistically and in response to antidepressant medication and cognitive therapy.

Congyu “Peter” Wu, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow
E-mail: congyu.wu@austin.utexas.edu

Peter is a postdoctoral fellow with the Whole Community Whole Health grand challenge initiative of the University of Texas at Austin. With mentors and collaborators in psychology, medicine, and electrical engineering, he is working to create new and more effective methods to mine personal sensing data from smart, mobile, and wearable devices for mental health inference and intervention. Before joining UT Austin, he completed a doctoral degree in systems engineering from the University of Virginia, where he focused on the theories and techniques of processing social signals data captured in cyber-human systems such as physical proximity encounters and online social networks. He has strong interest in using sensing technology to measure the ways people engage in social interactions and respond to social stimuli as well as using machine learning to uncover their connections with health, cognitive, and performance outcomes.

Kimberly Ray, Ph.D.

Research Scientist
E-mail: kimray@utexas.edu

Kimberly Ray, PhD is a Research Scientist working under the direction of David Schnyer, PhD and Christopher Beevers, PhD. She earned a bachelors degree in physics from Texas Lutheran University, and a PhD in Radiological Sciences with an emphasis on human neuroimaging from the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.  She also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California in Davis under the direction of Dr. Cameron Carter. Her research interests involve using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other imaging modalities to elucidate the functional and structural architecture of the human brain and examine how brain networks flexibly reorganize to efficiently carryout a given goal-directed task.

Graduate Students

Mary (Molly) Eileen McNamara, B.A.

4th Year Doctoral Student
Email: molly.mcnamara@utexas.edu

Mary (Molly) received her bachelor’s degree in Human Biology from Stanford University. While at Stanford, she worked in the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Lab on research investigating both the use of interpretation bias training with adolescents, as well as how parenting styles might affect neural development in teens with varying levels of suicidal ideation. After graduation, Molly worked as a project coordinator in the Golden Bear Sleep and Mood Research Clinic at UC Berkeley, launching a randomized controlled trial of a novel, adjunctive intervention designed to support patient memory for treatment.

Molly joined the Mood Disorders Laboratory as a doctoral student in 2018. She is interested in how cognitive biases and cognitive control might contribute to differences observed in depression both intra and inter-individually. She is also interested in the ways that translational research can help identify and influence treatment targets, as well as inform more personalized treatment planning.

Mackenzie Rae Zisser, B.A. 

3rd Year Doctoral Student
Email: mzisser@utexas.edu

Mackenzie received her bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of California- Berkeley in 2017. During her time at Berkeley, she worked with Dr. Sheri Johnson studying mental health in entrepreneurs and the interaction of gender, social dominance, and unipolar depression. After graduation, she worked as a project coordinator at the UC Berkeley CALM Laboratory managing an online treatment program for people with high levels of aggression and emotion-related impulsivity. She also worked as a research associate in the Berkeley Psychophysiology Lab gathering psychophysiological data in patients with dementia and their caregivers.

She is currently a first-year graduate student in the Mood Disorders Laboratory. She is interested in using technology to enhance the study and treatment of depression through internet- based interventions and ecological momentary assessment techniques.

Andrew Levihn-Coon, B.A.

2nd Year Doctoral Student
Email: alevihncoon@utexas.edu

Andrew graduated from Claremont McKenna College in 2015 with a B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy. After graduating, he was a research coordinator for Mark Powers, Ph.D., and Jasper Smits, Ph.D., at The University of Texas at Austin where he coordinated two randomized controlled trials examining the efficacy of virtual reality as treatment for arachnophobia and as a pain management intervention for hospital patients at Dell Seton Medical Center. At UT he also assisted in projects examining treatments for social anxiety, PTSD, panic attacks, and smoking cessation, with an emphasis on CBT and exercise augmentation. Andrew then worked as a clinical research coordinator for Anne Richards, M.D., M.P.H., at UCSF and the San Francisco VA Medical Center coordinating a randomized placebo-controlled clinical drug trial of doxazosin for PTSD nightmares, sleep disturbance, and overall PTSD symptoms.

Andrew is now a first year doctoral student in the Mood Disorders Laboratory. He is deeply interested in improving treatments for depression with a focus on behavioral change interventions that target exercise, sleep, diet, and social engagement. He is also interested in using mobile sensing data to personalize treatments for depression and to study a treatment’s effectiveness. Andrew remains passionate about reducing the stigma of mental illness so more patients in need seek effective evidence-based treatments.

Rachel Weisenburger, B.A.

1st Year Doctoral Student
Email: rachelweisenburger@utexas.edu

Rachel graduated from the University of Washington, Seattle, with a dual degree in Psychology and the Comparative History of Ideas in 2017. While at UW, she worked as a research assistant in Dr. Katie McLaughlin’s Stress and Development Lab and in the Department of Psychiatry’s Division of Public Behavioral Health and Justice Policy. After graduating, Rachel spent a year serving as an AmeriCorps Volunteer in Nashville, TN, where she worked as a college access counselor. Rachel then joined the Stanford SNAP Lab as a research coordinator, where she managed a longitudinal study examining the effects of early life stress on neurobiological, behavioral, and cognitive development across adolescence.

Rachel is currently a first-year doctoral student in the Mood Disorders Laboratory. She is interested in the role cognitive biases play in the development and maintenance of depression, and how these biases impact the way people think about themselves and their interpersonal relationships. Rachel is also interested in psychopathology classification and utilizing dimensional and symptom-level approaches to studying depression in her research.