Lana Ruvolo Grasser (she/her) is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Neuroscience and Novel Therapeutics Unit (NNT) within the Emotion and Development Branch at the National Institute of Mental Health. Here, she is using neuroimaging and psychophysiological measures to study irritability, anxiety, and their treatment in youth. She received her BS from Michigan State University and her Ph.D. from Wayne State University, where her NIMH-funded dissertation project, “Biomarkers of Risk and Resilience to Trauma in Syrian Refugee Youth”, identified skin conductance response to trauma interview and fear potentiated startle as candidate biomarkers of trauma-related psychopathology in youth exposed to civilian war trauma and forced migration. Dr. Grasser received the 2022 International Society for Developmental Psychobiology Dissertation Award for this work. Dr. Grasser has extended this work to query efficacy and underlying mechanisms of creative arts and movement therapies to address trauma-related psychopathology in families resettled as refugees of Syria, Iraq, the Congo, and Afghanistan. She has led efforts to extend these programs to the virtual space for schoolchildren and to neighborhoods across Detroit for youth and caregivers. In service to ADAA, she is the 2024-2025 Early Career Professionals/Students SIG Co-Chair and has served as a research-track mentor for the Career Development Leadership Award Program (of which she was a 2019 awardee) and as an abstract reviewer for the annual meeting for the past two years. She is also passionate about science policy and advocacy. Dr. Grasser is a member of the National Science Policy Network and was the 2022-2023 ACNP/AMP BRAD fellow. Most recently, she co-authored a policy brief on maternal health and mortality in the Journal of Science Policy and Governance.
