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Additional Professor of Clinical Psychology dr.himanikashyap@gmail.com Back Back to People Page Back Co-Investigator Team Dr Himani Kashyap Additional Professor of Clinical Psychology

Professor, Department of Psychiatry arunnimhans05@gmail.com Google Scholar Back Back to People Page Back Co-Investigator Team Dr Arun Kandasamy Professor, Department of Psychiatry Arun Kandasamy is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences. His clinical interests are Psychiatry, Public Health, Psychopharmacology, Neurobiology, Psychopathology, Neurobiology and Brain Physiology, Addiction Psychiatry, Neuropsychopharmacology, Comorbidity, Addiction Psychology

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Director & Senior Professor, Department of Psychiatry ResearchGate Back Back to People Page Back Co-Investigator Team Dr Pratima Murthy Director & Senior Professor, Department of Psychiatry Dr. Pratima brings about 30 years of extensive experience and exceptional accomplishments in the field of mental health. A well-recognized leader in addiction psychiatry, she has been instrumental in the successful development of state-of-the-art Centre for Addiction Medicine at NIMHANS. She has served as a consultant to prominent international agencies such as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the World Health Organisation (WHO). She has also served as a resource person for various flagship training programmes in substance abuse prevention and tobacco cessation in the country, and across the globe. Dr Pratima is also recognised for her contribution in improving care for persons with mental illness through her work with the National Human Rights Commission on quality assurance in mental health care both in institutions and in the community. In recognition of her research and academic excellence, Dr. Pratima has received numerous awards and honours including the prestigious Dr. Raja Ramanna State Award by the Government of Karnataka and Lifetime Achievement Award from Rotary. Recently, she was honoured with the WHO Regional Director’s Special Recognition Award on ‘World No Tobacco Day 2021’ for her remarkable service in tobacco control. A prolific author, she has more than 300 research publications in various international indexed journals and scientific books to her credit. Dr. Pratima received her MBBS degree from Bangalore Medical College in 1985. She obtained DPM and MD (Psychological Medicine) from NIMHANS in 1987 and 1989 respectively. She joined as a faculty at her alma mater in 1993, and has worked in various academic capacities since then. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (FRCP), Glasgow.

Lab Senior Scientist (Equivalent to Research Associate Professor), Department of Psychiatry reeteka@gmail.com Twitter | LinkedIn ORCID ID: 0000-0002-7866-6983 Resilience and representation in research: In conversation with Reeteka Sud Stress primes brain hub to trigger freezing for unrelated fears Back Back to People Page Back Co-Investigator Team Stem Cell Research Dr Reeteka Sud Lab Senior Scientist (Equivalent to Research Associate Professor), Department of Psychiatry CBM How can patient-derived stem cells help connect the dots, from genomic risk to clinical diagnosis -- this is the unifying research theme for my various projects. My expertise lies broadly at the intersection of Genetics, Neuroscience and Psychiatry. I head the CBM Biorepository at NIMHANS, where we bank biospecimen from psychiatric patients, including stem cells, DNA, plasma and serum. I am also very passionate about scicomm/public outreach on mental health conditions Select Publications 2026 PrecInNor: An Indo-Norway collaborative programme for precision psychiatry training | Asian J Psychiatry 2025 Defining suicidality phenotypes for genetic studies: perspectives of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium Suicide Working Group | Molecular Psychiatry The Psychiatric Genomics Consortium: discoveries and directions | Lancet Psychiatry The measurement of agitation in neurocognitive disorders: A systematic review | Alzheimer's & Dementia 2024 Exploring Mental Health Stima in the context of Psychiatric Genetics: Insights from the ISPG Stigma Reduction SIG Survey The STEM Arena in India: A Story of Exclusion in Many Colors Altered neuroepithelial morphogenesis and migration defects in iPSC-derived cerebral organoids and 2D neural stem cells in familial bipolar disorder | Oxford Open Neurosci Projects Deciphering the molecular mechanisms of treatment-resistant schizophrenia and clozapine response: To understand the genomic and cellular predictors of treatment-resistant schizophrenia (TRS) and clozapine response using genome-wide association study (GWAS) and induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSC): Here our aim is to: Identify genomic factors underlying TRS and clozapine response Elucidate cellular mechanisms of TRS and clozapine response in IPSC-derived organoids Evaluate the translational utility of these genetic/cellular markers as predictors of TRS and clozapine response using existing prospective cohorts (Funding from PGRN, BFI Foundation) Subcellular Dynamics in Neuropsychiatric Disorders: Our recent work highlights the manifold ways in which sub-cellular organelles may be driving disease pathogenesis. We discovered connections between APOE genotype and ribosome biogenesis, which could be significant for ADRD pathogenesis, and is currently under investigation. We are also using techniques like ExM to study how cytoskeletal structures mediate the workings of antipsychotic drugs, and by extension, be affected in psychotic disorders. (Funding from Ben Barres Award, Axilor Labs) Key Research Outputs (C) Direction of migration. C1-C3 cells migrated in a relatively directional pattern. B1 and B2 cells, however, migrated in a random, non-directed manner. Both BD lines showed back-and-forth movement, and directional and circular patterns of migration. (D) Sample migratory paths of control and patient-derived lines over 15 h. Abnormalities in the migration of neural precursor cells in familial bipolar disorder The trajectories of migrating neural precursors lay the foundations of the developing central nervous system. Here we demonstrate identifiable cellular abnormalities in NPCs derived from BD patients. The BD patients in this study were chosen from a dense family, who had multiple rare damaging variants implicated in cellular migration, and had structural abnormalities noted on brain MRI scans ( Fig. 1 A). Cellular migration analysis showed that although patient-derived NPCs showed a random trajectory, the NPCs from healthy controls migrated towards other cells (directed/ballistic movement) ( Fig. 1 C-D). Integration of deep clinical phenotyping with investigations into cellular mechanisms in patient-derived IPSCs, as reported here, can provide much-needed comprehensive understanding of psychiatric disorders. Cell cycle abnormality is a cellular phenotype in OCD A critical and yet unanswered question in Psychiatry is how might clinical phenotypes manifest in terms of cellular readouts. This study was conducted to determine differences in cell cycle in patient-derived cells vs controls A) Illustrates the placement of Indian samples between European and East Asian clusters, highlighting notable regional variability. Asian PCA with HGDP samples. B) Presents a north-south ancestral gradient, correlated with latitude. SVM predictions. C) Decile-based risk stratification in BD A cross ancestry genetic study of psychiatric disorders from India We estimated the extent of population stratification as well as the predictive accuracy of polygenic scores (PGS) derived from European samples to a data set from India. Our analyses reveal global and continental PCA overlap with other South Asian populations. Admixture analysis revealed a north-south genetic axis within India (FST 1.6%). The Bayesian PGS analyses indicates moderate-to-high predictive power for BD.

Career Development Fellow kalyanithepebble@gmail.com Twitter Google Scholar Back Back to People Page Back Lab Team Dr Kalyani B Karunakaran Career Development Fellow CBM, MGL

Professor, Department of Psychiatry Google Scholar Back Back to People Page Back Investigator Team Dementia, Schizophrenia Dr John P John Professor, Department of Psychiatry Dr. John P. John is a Professor of Psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bangalore, India. He underwent post-graduate training in Psychiatry at NIMHANS and post-doctoral training in MRI analyses at the Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, MO, USA. He has been a faculty at NIMHANS since 2002. His area of clinical specialization is General Adult Psychiatry. His research interest is in linking multi-modal brain imaging techniques (sMRI, fMRI, MRS, DTI, EEG, ERP, PSG) and genomics in understanding the neurobiology of schizophrenia, dementia as well as of different cognitive states. He is the Faculty-in-Charge of the Multimodal Brain Image Analysis Laboratory (MBIAL) at the Neurobiology Research Center at NIMHANS. He is also the faculty-in-charge of the ADBS Neuroimaging Centre (ANC) and the Centre for Brain Mapping (CBM) of the Department of Psychiatry at NIMHANS. Arora, S., Praveen, A. P., Subu, O., Suhas, S., Gowda, G. S., Reddi, V. S. K., & John, J. P. (2025). Sequential ketamine infusion and electroconvulsive therapy in severe depression with psychotic symptoms and pseudo-dementia – A case report. Asian Journal of Psychiatry , 104 , 104383. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajp.2025.104383 Arora, S., Suhas, S., Gowda, G. S., Reddi, V. S. K., & John, J. P. (2025). Avertible filicide: A call to action for early intervention and mental health support in India. Archives of Women’s Mental Health . https://doi.org/10.1007/s00737-025-01559-0 Feng, Y., Chandio, B. Q., Villalon‐Reina, J. E., Thomopoulos, S. I., Nir, T. M., Benavidez, S., Laltoo, E., Chattopadhyay, T., Joshi, H., Venkatasubramanian, G., John, J. P ., Jahanshad, N., Reid, R. I., Jack, C. R., Weiner, M. W., Thompson, P. M., & for the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. (2025). Microstructural mapping of neural pathways in Alzheimer’s disease using macrostructure‐informed normative tractometry. Alzheimer’s & Dementia , 21 (1), e14371. https://doi.org/10.1002/alz.14371 Malipeddi, S., Mehrotra, S., John, J. P. , & Kutty, B. M. (2024). Practice and proficiency of Isha Yoga for better mental health outcomes: Insights from a COVID-19 survey. Frontiers in Public Health , 12 , 1280859. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2024.1280859 Villalón-Reina, J. E., Zhu, A. H., Benavidez, S., Moreau, C. A., Feng, Y., Chattopadhyay, T., Nabulsi, L., Kushan, L., John, J. P. , Joshi, H., Thomopoulos, S. I., Lawrence, K. E., Nir, T. M., Jahanshad, N., Bearden, C. E., Kia, S. M., Marquand, A. F., Thompson, P. M., & the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. (2024). Lifespan Normative Modeling of Brain Microstructure . https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.12.15.628527

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Additional Professor, Department of Psychiatry urvakhsh@gmail.com LinkedIn | Google Scholar Back Back to People Page Back Co-Investigator Team Dr Urvaksh M Mehta Additional Professor, Department of Psychiatry Urvakhsh Mehta practices in Bengaluru, India. He is highly rated in 2 conditions, according to our data. His top areas of expertise are Schizophrenia, COVID-19, Bipolar Disorder (BPD), and Delirium Tremens. His clinical research consists of co-authoring 119 peer reviewed articles in the past 15 years.

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Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry vkkg24@gmail.com Google Scholar Back Back to People Page Back Co-Investigator Team Dr Vijay Kumar K G Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry

Project Associate karishmaravikumar02@gmail.com Twitter PMID: 37067100 Back Back to People Page Back Lab Team Karishma G R Project Associate CBM, GenECT Karishma is a dual degree graduate in Molecular Medicine, holding an M. Tech from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Kochi, and an MS from the University of Arizona, US. Her previous research focused on understanding the interactions between cancer cells and neurons. Beyond science, she is trained in Bharathanatyam and loves dancing. Her favourite pastime activities include reading books, watching movies and expressing her thoughts through writing.