Carolyn I. Rodriguez

Carolyn I. Rodriguez is a Puerto Rican psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and clinical researcher developing treatments for obsessive compulsive disorder as well as mapping circuit dysfunction in the human brain. Rodriguez holds appointments in both clinical and academic departments at Stanford University. Rodriguez is a Clinical Lab Director at the Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging, an associate professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and a Director of several specialized translational research programs.

Early life and education Rodriguez was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She moved to Boston for her undergraduate degree in Computer Science at Harvard University. Her technology has been cited hundreds of times and is now widely used many researchers in neuroscience.

Rodriguez moved to New York City to complete her internship, residency, and postdoctoral training at Columbia University Medical Center-NYSPI. When she first treated a patient with OCD, she was taken aback by how disabling the disease was and she became frustrated by both the lack of treatments and the long time course before existing treatments begin to relieve patients symptoms. Rodriguez explored the rapid therapeutic effects of Ketamine as a treatment for OCD. To determine the origins of the precerebellar neurons, Rodriguez developed a genetic tool, using flip-recombinase, that allowed for irreversible fluorescent tagging of descendent cells from a specific progenitor.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder and hoarding disorder Rodriguez published a case study exploring the difficulty in diagnosing and treating an individual with signs of both OCD and schizophrenia, and she displayed the efficacy of treating OCD with glutamate modulators posing future questions about their longitudinal use in treating OCD.

Rodriguez and her colleagues tested a novel glutamate modulator, minocycline, to assess its potential for relief of OCD symptoms as an alternative to SSRIs. They found that minocycline might ameliorate early onset OCD and improve symptoms of primary hoarding, and their results overall suggest that further studies are warranted to explore minocycline as a therapeutic agent for early-onset OCD. They found significant decreases in obsessions that lasted for more than one week. Her findings highlighted the potential of treating HD in reducing homelessness in New York and Rodriguez began to explore new and improved treatments for HD.

Career and research In 2015, Rodriguez joined the faculty at Stanford University as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and a member of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. Rodriguez was also appointed the Director of the Stanford Hoarding Disorders Research Program, the Director of the Translational OCD Research Program, and the Director of the Translational Therapeutics Lab, which is also the Rodriguez Lab. Rodriguez's lab focuses on understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of emotion and behavior in order to develop rapid acting therapeutics for mental illnesses. They focus on drug discovery and participate in clinical trials to test mechanisms and efficacy of their compounds and treatments in the human brain. They found that subjects treated with Ketamine had higher GABA levels than controls, and these findings support data showing that patients with OCD have decreased GABAergic activity. They found that Rapastinel, a NMDAR glycine-site partial agonist, showed similar improvements in obsessions associated with OCD while accompanied by fewer side effects compared to ketamine treatment. They surprisingly found that opioid signalling plays an important role in mediating ketamines acute anti-depressant effects but does not seem to play as dominant a role in mediating the dissociative effects.

Rodriguez also advocates for equity, inclusion, and diversity in science and medicine. She recently co-authored an article in the Harvard Business Review Her writing has also created an avenue for public awareness of the stages of ketamine research for use in mental illness.

Awards and honors 2019 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) 2018 Chairman's Annual Award for Excellence Across Multiple Missions – Stanford Medical School 2017 A.E. Bennett Research Award for Outstanding Contributions to Clinical/Translational Research – Society for Biological Psychiatry 2017 Gerald R. Klerman Award Honorable Mention for outstanding clinical research achievement – Brain and Behavior Research Foundation 2015 Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Award, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Select publications "Effects of Rapastinel (Formerly GLYX-13) on Serum Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder". Omer Linkovski, Hanyang Shen, Jordana Zwerling, Maria Filippou-Frye, Booil Jo, Elisabeth Cordell, Thomas B. Cooper, Helen Blair Simpson, Ronald M. Burch, Joseph R. Moskal, Francis Lee, Carolyn I. Rodriguez, J. Clin. Psychiatry. 2018 Jan/Feb;79(1):17l11824 "Increased functional connectivity between the default mode and salience networks in unmedicated adults with obsessive-compulsive disorder." Posner J, Song I, Lee S, Rodriguez CI, Moore H, Marsh R, Blair Simpson H. HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING. 2016 "Can expose-based CBT extend the effects of intravenous ketamine in obsessive-compulsive disorder? an open-label trial." Rodriguez, C. I., Wheaton, M., Zwerling, J., Steinman, S. A., Sonnenfeld, D., Galfalvy, H., Simpson, H. B. JOURNAL OF CLINICAL PSYCHIATRY. 2016; 77 (3): 408-409 "In vivo effects of ketamine on glutamate-glutamine and gamma-aminobutyric acid in obsessive-compulsive disorder: Proof of concept." Rodriguez, C. I., Kegeles, L. S., Levinson, A., Ogden, R. T., Mao, X., Milak, M. S., Vermes, D., Xie, S., Hunter, L., Flood, P., Moore, H., Shungu, D. C., Simpson, H. B. Psychiatry research. 2015; 233 (2): 141–7. "Bridging the Divide: Advances and Challenges in Understanding the Impact of Race and Ethnicity on the Mental Health of Older Adults." Rodriguez, C. I., Zwerling, J., Sonnenfeld, D. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF GERIATRIC PSYCHIATRY. 2015; 23 (6): 545-547 "Randomized Controlled Crossover Trial of Ketamine in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Proof-of-Concept." Rodriguez, C. I., Kegeles, L. S., Levinson, A., Feng, T., Marcus, S. M., Vermes, D., Flood, P., Simpson, H. B. NEUROPSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY. 2013; 38 (12): 2475–2483 "Prevalence and Correlates of Difficulty Discarding Results From a National Sample of the US Population." Rodriguez, C. I., Simpson, H. B., Liu, S., Levinson, A., Blanco, C. JOURNAL OF NERVOUS AND MENTAL DISEASE. 2013; 201 (9): 795-801 "Prevalence of Hoarding Disorder in Individuals at Potential Risk of Eviction in New York City A Pilot Study." Rodriguez, C. I., Herman, D., Alcon, J., Chen, S., Tannen, A., Essock, S., Simpson, H. B. JOURNAL OF NERVOUS AND MENTAL DISEASE. 2012; 200 (1): 91-94 "Minocycline Augmentation of Pharmacotherapy in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: An Open-Label Trial." Rodriguez, C. I., Bender, J., Marcus, S. M., Snape, M., Rynn, M., Simpson, H. B.. JOURNAL OF CLINICAL PSYCHIATRY. 2010; 71 (9): 1247–1249 "High-efficiency deleter mice show that FLPe is an alternative to Cre-loxP." Rodriguez, C. I., Buchholz, F., Galloway, J., Sequerra, R., Kasper, J., Ayala, R., Stewart, A. F., Dymecki, S. M. NATURE GENETICS. 2000; 25 (2): 139-140 "Origin of the precerebellar system." Rodriguez, C. I., Dymecki, S. M. NEURON. 2000; 27 (3): 475-486