For Dr. Jacek Kolacz, mental health treatments are about addressing underlying causes, not just symptoms. His work focuses on patients who have lived through chronic threat, including those who have developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These patients often have complex disorders of both the brain and body, including the heart, gut, and even vocal muscles. To understand why, Kolacz realized he needed to go beyond talk therapy and study the body’s physiology–and that meant collecting more data.

Dr. Sean Nestor has built his career on developing new ways to push research forward. As an MD-PhD candidate, he developed a novel method to rapidly and accurately segment brain anatomy from MRI scans. Now, a clinician investigator and interventional psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Research Institute in Ontario, Canada, he combines brain imaging and investigational neuromodulation techniques (specifically transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS) to improve outcomes for people living with difficult to treat depression. These techniques are effective but expensive, making them inaccessible to many patients.