Generously funded by the Goodman-Klein-Pinckney Family Foundation

Dr. Boyle received her Ph.D. in Health Psychology from UCLA in 2018 and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Norman Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at UCLA. Broadly, her research aims to characterize psychobiological mechanisms underlying risk and resilience to onset and recurrence of depressive disorders. She is particularly interested in how inflammatory signaling can induce dysregulation in the reward system to cause the symptom of anhedonia, or loss of interest or pleasure. As a UCLA PNI Fellow, she is using an experimental model to examine effects of inflammation on anhedonic symptoms in pre- and post-menopausal women to better understand sex and age differences in depression prevalence. Support from the Friends Scholar program will allow her to expand her research program to study effects of inflammation on anhedonia in individuals with anxiety, a well known risk factor for depression, and to interrogate the neural systems that may underlie these effects. The results gathered from this study are designed to facilitate identification of vulnerable individuals prior to onset of depression, and to inform the development of more precise and targeted interventions for depression treatment.