Associate Professor with Tenure
Baylor College of Medicine
Bellaire, Texas, United States
Kelly Rowe Bijanki, PhD is an affective and systems neuroscientist and tenured Associate Professor of Neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine, where she directs the Translational Neuromodulation Lab. She earned her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Iowa in 2011, and completed NIH‐funded postdoctoral fellowships in Biological Psychiatry (T32 NRSA) at Iowa, and in Deep Brain Stimulation (KL2) at Emory University.
Dr. Bijanki’s lab integrates stereotactic EEG, intracranial stimulation, neuroimaging, affective tasks, and multimodal data integration to map and modulate circuits underlying mood and social cognition. She serves as PI on NIH R01-MH127006 and MPI on R01-MH130597, following earlier career awards (KL2TR000455, K01-MH116364, R21-NS104953). Her team led the first investigator-initiated multi-target DBS trial for treatment-resistant depression and she holds one U.S. patent for stimulation-based affective modulation.
With publications in Human Brain Mapping, Nature Mental Health, Biological Psychiatry, and the Journal of Clinical Investigation, her work has attracted national press and NIH Director’s recognition. She mentors trainees across Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University, UTHealth, and Emory University, and is launching a noninvasive EEG/MEG program to translate intracranial insights into scalable biomarkers and therapeutics.
Biomarkers in Neuromodulation for Psychiatric Disorders
Sunday, January 25, 2026
10:20 AM - 10:35 AM PST