Benjamin Suarez-Jimenez, Ph.D.

Professional Background

I obtained a bachelor's of psychology from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez campus, where I started to examine the effects of the 2003 Iraq war on children’s resiliency and on their academic performance.

Following my B.A., I participated in the Summer Program for Undergraduate Research Fellowship, and afterward the Post-Baccalaureate Research Education Program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. This led to an Intramural Research Training Award (IRTA) from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to continue my research training. At both post-baccalaureate programs I explored the biology of anxiety in primates.

Seeking to expand my understanding of anxiety in humans and further develop my skills as a researcher, I pursued a Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the NIMH-UCL Graduate Partnership Program, mentored by Drs. Christian Grillon and Daniel Pine at the NIMH, and Professor Neil Burgess at University College London (UCL). In my research, I explored neural activity involved in environmental discrimination learning using basic task-based fMRI methods. I created and validated a novel VR paradigm to study discrimination learning in healthy adults.

To further expand my previous research efforts to clinically relevant research in the field of PTSD, I was awarded a T32 Ruth L. Kirschstein Institutional National Research Service Award (NRSA) postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University, under the mentorship of Dr. Yuval Neria. Afterwards, I was awarded a K01 grant and promoted to Assistant Professor at the Psychiatry Department. During this time, I acquired knowledge in the assessment and treatment of pathological anxiety and PTSD to understand the neural signatures of PTSD, using my VR tasks.

These experiences and projects have solidified my commitment to understanding the neural mechanisms of environmental discrimination learning in individuals with anxiety and trauma-related disorders. I am dedicated to supporting these communities through my research because of (1) my personal background, (2) the recent disproportional increases in PTSD and anxiety disorder diagnoses, particularly in the military population, and (3) how understudied and underserved these populations remain.

Research