Kelly Bijanki

Kelly Bijanki is an Associate Professor of Neurosurgery, Director of Intracranial Monitoring Research, and holds joint appointments in Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine. Her work bridges clinical neurosurgery and neuroscience, focusing on understanding the neural basis of affective disorders and developing neuromodulation therapies. She directs the Translational Neuromodulation Lab, where she leverages stereotactic electroencephalography (sEEG) to study deep brain structures critical to emotional functioning.

Dr. Bijanki's research explores the electrophysiological, neurobiological, and behavioral correlates of neuromodulation of affective neural circuits. Her lab primarily works with patients undergoing intracranial monitoring for epilepsy or depression, using this unique platform to conduct in-vivo studies of neural correlates to affective function. Her work has identified novel stimulation-based strategies for evoking positive affect and anxiolysis, including the discovery that stimulation to the cingulum bundle evokes changes in anxiolysis, mirth, and euphoria, which was featured as a cover article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation and highlighted in the NIH Director's Blog.

Analysis of her recent publications reveals a consistent focus on mapping neural circuits involved in emotion processing, particularly using stereo-EEG informed deep brain stimulation approaches. Her work spans multiple psychiatric conditions including depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and anxiety disorders, with a strong emphasis on translating electrophysiological findings into therapeutic applications. The integration of computational approaches, particularly machine learning for decoding neural activity related to mood states, represents a growing trend in her research program.

Her scientific achievements include:

• United States Patent (US:11,241,575) for a novel stimulation-based strategy for evoking positive affect and anxiolysis
• Journal of Clinical Investigation cover article (March 2019) on cingulum stimulation enhancing positive affect
• NIH Director's Blog feature highlighting her groundbreaking work
• Multiple NIH grants including R01, R21, and K01 awards

Dr. Bijanki mentors a diverse team including graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and undergraduate researchers. Her research program is generously funded by multiple NIH grants (R01-MH127006, R01-MH130597, K01MH116364, R21NS104953, UH3NS103549), as well as support from the ARCO Foundation, Caroline Wiess Law Fund, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and NARSAD. She maintains strong collaborations with researchers at institutions including UTSW, Iowa, Duke, UCLA, Brown, UPenn, and WashU.

The Translational Neuromodulation Lab operates at the intersection of clinical neurosurgery, neuroscience, and engineering, utilizing stereo-EEG as a research platform to study deep brain structures involved in emotional processing. The lab employs multiple methodologies including advanced surgical neuroimaging, affective electrophysiology, autonomic surveillance, facial motor analysis, and pulse-evoked potentials to comprehensively characterize mood-relevant neural circuits. Their current flagship project involves using explainable artificial intelligence to map the relationship between mood and intracranial neural activity, with the goal of developing naturalistic patterns of intracranial stimulation for therapeutic applications.