Research Mission

The Neuromodulation of Emotion (NEMO) Research Group is a team of clinician scientists with a background in psychiatry, psychology or social neuroscience who work together in understanding emotion and improving the treatment of stress-related mental disorders characterized by a lack of emotional equilibrium, such as major depression, schizophrenia, and borderline personality disorder. Unravelling the pathophysiological substrates of stress-related mental disorders, and developing personalized treatments targeting these substrates, thus is of tremendous importance to our research agenda. Converging evidence suggests that there are specific brain circuits that mediate stress responsiveness and regulate emotional and cognitive functions. Stress-related mental disorders represent brain-based conditions that lead to dysregulation of these neural circuits. Our work has its focus on developing innovative neuromodulation therapies precisely addressing these networks in order to establish more rapid and robust modalities for treating stress-related mental disorders. One promising new lead for translation into the clinic is the peptide hormone oxytocin, which may help alleviate loneliness and social anxiety through its neuromodulatory action in various brain regions including the amygdala. By pursuing clinical studies in patients as well as preclinical studies in healthy volunteers, NEMO combines translational research strategies and integrates key insights from diverse methodological sources, including behavioral neuroscience, functional neuroimaging, and a broad range of brain stimulation techniques from neuronavigated accelerated TMS to DBS. In addition, we collaborate with partners from industry and academia in order (i) to improve the accuracy of diagnosing stress-related mental disorders via artificial intelligence (AI)-based digital phenotyping and (ii) to develop AI-powered digital assistants for patients with stress-related mental disorders. The overall aim is to foster the advent of patient-centered precision psychiatry, which seeks to increase efficacy of therapeutic interventions and decrease adverse effects by considering the individual characteristics of each and every patient. Taken together, our research activities are currently centered around the following core themes: