Uma R. Chatterjee, M.S., MHPS, is an award-winning mental health neuroscientist, science communicator, and lived experience advocate whose work spans the translational research continuum—from studying disease biology in the human brain and modeling its mechanisms in the laboratory to communicating science with the communities it is ultimately intended to serve. Throughout her career, Uma has worked to better understand how genetic risk becomes mental illness—and how discoveries made in the laboratory can ultimately improve people’s lives. After earning her undergraduate degree as a non-traditional student and an M.S. in Neuroscience from the University of Texas at Dallas, she is currently a Ph.D. candidate and NIH TL1 Predoctoral Fellow in the University of Wisconsin–Madison Neuroscience Training Program.
Working in Dr. Michael Cahill’s laboratory, Uma uses reverse-translational approaches to investigate the genetic and biological mechanisms underlying neuropsychiatric disorders, with a primary focus on obsessive-compulsive disorder and additional research spanning depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. Her work moves between human and animal models—from biochemical analyses of postmortem human brain tissue to mechanistic studies of behavior, neural circuitry, and synaptic plasticity. She is conducting the first known studies quantifying OCD-associated proteins in the human brain and translating human molecular findings into experimental models to understand how genetic risk contributes to disease biology and identify more precise therapeutic targets. Her broader scientific interests include precision psychiatry, neuromodulation, and the mechanisms through which psychedelic compounds may affect psychiatric symptoms and neural circuitry.
Alongside her research, Uma is committed to making science understandable, accessible, and useful beyond the laboratory. A globally invited public speaker, she has delivered more than 150 presentations—including keynote addresses, plenary lectures, scientific seminars, educational workshops, and panels—to audiences around the world. She is also the host of A Chat with Uma, a mental health podcast reaching tens of thousands of listeners across more than 75 countries. Her science communication and lived experience advocacy have reached millions through scientific, mental health, advocacy, and media organizations and platforms including the National Institute of Mental Health, National Alliance on Mental Illness, One Mind, American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, American Psychological Association’s Speaking of Psychology, Ologies, ABC, and NOCD.
Beyond her research, Uma has served in leadership and advisory roles across neuroscience, mental health, and OCD advocacy, including as a member of the One Mind Lived Experience
Council, a board member of the Society for Neuroscience’s Upper Midwest Chapter, Past President of OCD Wisconsin, and an International OCD Foundation Advocate. Across these roles, she works to advance science communication, mental health equity, meaningful integration of lived experience, and stronger relationships between researchers and the communities their work is intended to serve.
Most importantly, Uma’s path to this work began long before she entered a laboratory. Long before she became a neuroscientist, she was navigating the very conditions she now studies. She lives with severe mental illness, neurodivergence, chronic illness, cancer, and disability—including clinically extreme OCD, PTSD, treatment-resistant depression, bulimia, and ADHD. More than 25 years spent navigating delayed diagnosis, ineffective treatment, fragmented systems, and barriers to appropriate mental healthcare shaped how she thinks about mental illness—not only as a scientific problem to understand, but as a human problem to solve. Those experiences ultimately led her to neuroscience and continue to influence the questions she asks, the research she pursues, and her commitment to ensuring that people with lived experience are not merely the subjects or eventual beneficiaries of research, but meaningful partners in shaping it.
Through FORCE, Uma brings together the worlds she has spent her life navigating—as a scientist, patient, storyteller, science communicator, educator, and advocate—to help shorten the distance between scientific discovery and people’s lives. Ultimately, her goal is to help lessen unnecessary human suffering by building stronger connections between the people who study mental illness, the people who treat it, and the people who live it.
