Georgia E. Hodes has been named as an assistant professor in the School of Neuroscience at Virginia Tech, part of the College of Science.

Hodes earned a bachelor of arts in drama and dance from Bard College, and then a doctoral degree in psychology from Rutgers in 2007. She also has served as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. She most recently taught at Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai.

Her research focuses on identifying how the immune system interacts with the brain to functionally contribute to stress susceptibility, particularly how sex differences in the brain and body lead to the higher occurrence of mood disorders in females. Her goal is to develop novel personalized treatments and bioassays for mental illness so that these disorders can be effectively diagnosed and treated. 

She recently won the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation to study depression. The award will allow her to study how differences in the male and female peripheral immune system may contribute to the sex differences in depression and identify defined cytokine profiles that are associated with depression.

Hodes is one of 18 tenured and tenure-track faculty members to join the College of Science and the new Virginia Tech School of Neuroscience this year. 

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