Maya Schumer, PhD

Dr. Maya Schumer is a T32 postdoctoral fellow in psychiatric neuroscience at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School who studies and lives with bipolar disorder. She earned her PhD in neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 2023 under the mentorship of Dr. Mary Phillips, where her doctoral work focused on functional neuroimaging and the neural circuitry underlying risk for Bipolar Disorder. During her PhD, she led a large-scale meta-analysis of over 200 functional neuroimaging studies in bipolar disorder, identifying critical gaps in the study of mania and mixed states, and cross-sectional independent sample replications of bipolar disorder risk markers.

Dr. Schumer’s current research focuses on elucidating the neural network dynamics underlying  mania, hypomania, and mood-state transitions in bipolar disorder. Under the mentorship of Dr. Dost Öngür at McLean, she uses resting-state fMRI, connectomics, and network-based approaches to identify reproducible biomarkers of risk and illness progression. Her work integrates dimensional symptom frameworks to better characterize the transition from subsyndromal risk states to syndromal bipolar disorder.

Broadly, her research aims to advance biologically informed models of bipolar disorder that can improve early identification, prevention, and personalized intervention. In parallel, Dr. Schumer is engaged in advocacy and community-oriented efforts, such as the OMCAN, the Society of Biological Psychiatry’s Community Engagement Committee, the International Society for Bipolar Disorders (ISBD) Early-Mid Career Committee and the ISBD Task Force for Suicide Prevention, that integrate lived experience into psychiatric research, with the goal of reshaping how serious mental illness is studied and understood.