Dr. Marija Kundakovic

Dr. Marija Kundakovic is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Fordham University. She received a PhD in Biochemistry & Molecular Genetics from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and completed her postdoctoral training at Columbia University and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. In 2015, she was awarded a NARSAD Young Investigator Award by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation and established her own research laboratory at Fordham University. Dr. Kundakovic has been at the forefront of the psychiatric epigenetics research since her early career, and her lab focuses on hormonal and environmental factors driving sex differences in depression, anxiety disorders, and drug abuse. The Kundakovic lab recently discovered a sex-specific epigenetic regulation in the female brain as a function of the ovarian cycle, providing a new molecular framework to study the female-specific susceptibility to psychiatric disorders. Dr. Kundakovic’s research is funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health.