Lucas Trambaiolli
Assistant Professor
The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
McGovern Medical School
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine
Psychiatric disorders arise from disruptions in large-scale brain networks that integrate cognitive control, emotion regulation, motivation, and action selection. Despite advances in neuroimaging, the field still lacks mechanistically grounded circuit models capable of reliably predicting symptom dimensions or treatment response. My research program addresses this challenge by integrating cross-species neuroanatomy, multimodal neuroimaging, and computational modeling to identify and modulate the neural circuits underlying psychiatric disorders. Specifically, I combine non-human primate data with human electroencephalography (EEG), functional MRI (fMRI), diffusion MRI (dMRI), and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to build biologically informed models of cortico-striatal-limbic networks linked to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), major depressive disorder (MDD), and related conditions.
My central hypothesis is that structural connectivity constrains functional dynamics in measurable and clinically meaningful ways, and that incorporating anatomically validated priors into neuroimaging analyses can enhance biomarker discovery and intervention design. Current projects focus on identifying circuits that predict treatment response, delineating transdiagnostic connectivity profiles across symptom domains, and developing real-time neurofeedback paradigms to modulate maladaptive networks. Experimental approaches include analysis of large-scale clinical neuroimaging datasets, cross-species connectomic modeling, machine learning–based biomarker identification, and closed-loop neuromodulation studies. Through this work, my laboratory aims to advance precision psychiatry by translating circuit-level neuroscience into clinically actionable tools for diagnosis, prognosis, and targeted intervention.
McGovern Medical School Faculty
Education & Training
PhD, Federal University of ABC - Brazil, 2018