Sarah McEwen

Dr. McEwen joined atai Life Sciences in 2021.

Dr. McEwen has over 15 years of research experience in both research and clinical settings. Previously, Dr. McEwen was the Director of Research at the Providence Saint John’s Health Center: Pacific Brain Health Center and an Associate Professor in the Department of Translational Neurosciences and Neurotherapeutics at the Saint John’s Cancer Institute where she led the development and implementation of a clinical research department at the Pacific Brain Health Center. There she conducted clinical research using precision psychiatry and multi-modal neuroimaging to explore the efficacy of novel therapies for mental health and neurocognitive conditions. Dr. McEwen also serves as an Editor for the peer-reviewed journal NeuroReport.

Prior to that, she was a research scientist in the School of Medicine, Departments of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of California, Los Angeles where she served as PI of grants from the NIH (NIMH, NIA), Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, and National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, and Co-I of grants from the DoD, Providence Health Care System and National Parkinson’s Foundation. Dr. McEwen’s scientific research utilized multi-modal MRI approaches to identify brain changes in structural and functional connectivity and neurochemical markers of activity-dependent neuroplasticity in patients with schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, and subjective cognitive impairments.

Dr. McEwen holds a B.A. in Psychology and Human Development from the University of California, Davis, an MSc in Psychology from Trinity College Dublin, a Ph.D. in Psychology from Trinity College Dublin, and completed her NIH T32 Postdoctoral Fellowship in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles.