Janitza Montalvo-Ortiz, PhD

Janitza Montalvo-Ortiz studies how genetic and molecular variation contributes to neuropsychiatric conditions, with the goal of uncovering biological pathways and identifying markers that could support more precise and preventive approaches to care. A central focus of her work is understanding how exposure to trauma over the course of life shapes risk for disorders such as substance use disorder (SUD), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and major depression. Her research program centers on two core aims. One is to build integrated, multi-layered profiles of psychiatric disorders by combining data from genomic, epigenomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic analyses using both peripheral samples and postmortem brain tissue. The other is to expand representation in psychiatric genomics by prioritizing the inclusion of Latin American populations.

biomarkers ;  computational modeling ;  deep learning ;  epigenetics ;  genomics ;  meta analysis ;  statistical methods ;  transcriptomics  

artificial intelligence ;  computational psychiatry ;  genetics ;  machine learning ;  mental health ;  predictive modeling ;  stress ;  systems neuroscience  

Montalvo-Ortiz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Division of Human Genetics at Yale School of Medicine and a Research Biologist at the CT VA. She is a neuroscientist with a strong expertise in molecular genetics. She completed her BA in Biology at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, and obtained her PhD in Neuroscience from Northwestern University in Chicago. She is a co-founder and co-leader of the Latin American Genomics Consortium and the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium Substance Use Disorders Epigenetics workgroup, and the Yale site PI of the All of Us Research Program.