Rachel Zsido, Ph.D. (Scholar TWIN 2)

Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Psychiatry

Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital

Dr. Rachel Zsido is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in the Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Zsido received her B.A. in Neurobiology from Harvard University. As a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Fellow, she researched sex differences in stress and anxiety-related disorders at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her B.A. thesis, “Contributions of estradiol and hormonal contraceptive use to sex differences during fear extinction recall”, received the Best Manuscript Award from The Harvard Undergraduate Research Journal. Dr. Zsido then completed her Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. During her doctoral studies, she used multimodal neuroimaging techniques (MRI, EEG, PET) to investigate how sex steroids shape brain structure, function, and chemistry across the lifespan; with emphasis on women’s increased risk for depression and dementia. She was the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Joachim Herz Foundation Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Life Science and the Dr. Margarete Blank Publication Prize for noteworthy scientific work in the field of sex and gender medicine.

Under the mentorship of Dr. Jill Goldstein, Dr. Zsido now applies a sex differences lens to investigate how prenatal immune programming, sex steroids, and brain stress circuitry interact to contribute to the shared pathophysiology underlying three chronic diseases: major depressive disorder (MDD), cardiovascular disease (CVD), and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Given that CVD and MDD are both significant risk factors for AD, and that sex differences in MDD occur earlier in life,

Dr. Zsido is especially interested in how emotion dysregulation and depression may serve as preclinical risk factors for identifying and intervening in potential CVD and AD development later in life. In addition to her research, Dr. Zsido has a strong interest in femtech and how it can be used to enhance scientific studies and improve healthcare standards for everyone. As women are at increased risk for MDD, for the co-occurrence of MDD with CVD, and for AD, she believes that femtech may provide an interdisciplinary framework for addressing sex-driven differences in pathology and supporting healthy cognitive aging across the female lifespan.