Dr. Felipe Jain is Director of Healthy Aging Studies at the Depression Clinical and Research Program, a Psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. He is the first psychiatrist to receive the prestigious Paul K. Beeson K76 Emerging Leaders in Aging Research Career Development Award from the National Institute on Aging.
Dr. Jain graduated from Brown University, magna cum laude, with an Sc.B. in neuroscience in 2000, and from Harvard Medical School and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences in Technology cum laude in 2008 with a thesis focused on neurophysiology. His research focuses on guided imagery and mindfulness practices for the treatment of depression and anxiety, and biomarkers that may be used to personalize treatment.
Dr. Jain has received research funding from the National Institutes of Health and private foundations to develop a “second-generation” mindfulness and guided imagery treatment approach, Mentalizing Imagery Therapy, that seeks to encourage perspective taking and other relationship skills, in addition to promoting increased well-being and reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety. Along with studying the therapeutic benefit of this approach with a particular focus on family dementia caregivers, Dr. Jain studies how it impacts functional brain activation using magnetic resonance imaging.
More broadly, Dr. Jain studies how brain imaging markers, neurohormones, and the autonomic nervous system may be used to understand depression and its response to treatment. Dr. Jain sees patients in clinical practice at the Depression Clinical and Research Program and supervises psychiatry residents in their psychopharmacology and psychotherapy training in the Massachusetts General Hospital – McLean Hospital Psychiatry Residency Program at Harvard Medical School, ranked #1 by US News and World Report.