Ian Cook

Ian Ainsworth Cook (born May 1, 1960) is an American psychiatrist. He is an associate professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles's David Geffen School of Medicine. He is also a research scientist at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and the Brain Research Institute at UCLA. He serves as director of the UCLA Depression Research Program and associate director of the UCLA Laboratory of Brain, Behavior, and Pharmacology. Cook holds the Joanne and George Miller & Family Chair in Depression Research. before joining the faculty and becoming ABPN certified in psychiatry. Dr. Cook co-founded HeartCloud, Inc., a digital health startup focused on remote physiologic monitoring, where he was CEO and chief medical officer. He is a named inventor on dozens of U.S. patents ranging from neuropsychiatric disorders to healthcare APIs.

Cook's work has largely focused on the care of mental disorders and disorders of complex human behavior. He is a co-inventor of the cordance method for studying regional brain activity with electroencephalograms.

Research by Cook and his colleagues has shown that past use of antidepressants can influence the brain's reaction to antidepressant placebos, that standard advice on diet and exercise for heart health can also lead to better brain health, that different types of advertisement evoke different types of brain activity, that electroencephalogram measurements could predict the outcome of antidepressant drug treatment on an individual patient long before the drugs make any observable changes to the patient's moods, and that electrical stimulation of the trigeminal nerve can be an effective alternative to drug therapy for depression.

Fellowships 2009 - Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association