Fatima Rizwan is a recent graduate with a Master's in Clinical Psychology, with a concentration in Trauma and Neuroscience from Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research is strongly focused on identifying, dissecting, and mapping brain changes in relation to behavioral outcomes in anxiety- and mood-related disorders. She is particularly interested in discovering biomarkers that can track disease impairment and improvement. Her current work integrates neuroimaging, machine learning, and clinical psychology to delineate the neurobiological underpinnings of mental disorders.
Following a multimodal approach, she has leveraged clinical data, behavioral assessments, and structural and functional brain imaging to gain comprehensive insights into mechanisms of change in exposure-based interventions. Beyond identifying brain-based networks, she is also interested in how these findings inform emotion regulation—a transdiagnostic mechanism that not only contributes to symptom persistence but may also interfere with treatment engagement and efficacy.
By integrating clinical and brain-based data, Fatima Rizwan aims to generate translational findings that support personalized treatment strategies and advance precision mental healthcare. Looking ahead, she hopes to examine more deeply the brain networks implicated in psychopathology and emotion dysregulation, and to develop predictive models that identify who is most likely to benefit from specific interventions. She welcomes opportunities for collaboration in biomarker discovery, treatment prediction, and the advancement of neuroscience-informed mental health care.