Dr. Jennifer Strafford Stevens is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine. She received her BS in Psychology from the University of Georgia and PhD in Cognitive and Developmental Psychology at Emory University, where she studied with Dr. Stephan Hamann and Dr. Patricia Bauer.  She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Dept. of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory, mentored by Dr. Kerry Ressler and Dr. Tanja Jovanovic. Her expertise is in translational neuroscience, using neuroimaging approaches to probe brain function in healthy individuals, and neurobiological pathways promoting stress vulnerability or resilience. Neural circuits supporting emotional arousal, fear learning, and memory encoding are particularly important for adapting to trauma and other forms of environmental stress. She has investigated individual differences in these circuits in normative and trauma-exposed populations of adults and children. A major theme of her research has been to understand sex differences in emotion-related brain function, and the brain basis of women’s increased risk for trauma-related psychopathology. She addresses these questions using cognitive tasks to probe behavioral and subjective aspects of emotion and memory, and neurobiological measures such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), scalp electrophysiology, and autonomic physiological measures. She directs the Neuroimaging Core at the CVNR. She also co-directs of the Grady Trauma Project, a long-standing NIMH-funded study of civilian trauma and PTSD.  She is PI of several studies investigating brain circuit-based models of trauma-related stress responses.

Research Interests:

Post-traumatic stress disorder, cognitive neuroscience, women’s health, fear learning, memory, neuroimaging

Publications:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/myncbi/jennifer.stevens.2/bibliography/47509744/public/?sort=date&direction=ascending