PsychEng Seminar 2022 February 15: Dr. Abigail Ortiz, U of T Psychiatry - Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering

Tuesday, February 15, 2022
12:05pm-1:30pm

Dr. Abigail Ortiz, MD, MSc, FRCPC
Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto

Title: Good days and bad days: What you always wanted to know about mood regulation

Date: Tuesday, February 15, 2022
Time: 12:05pm-1:30pm

Location: Zoom – meeting information upon registration.

Abstract:

Dr. Ortiz will be discussing her work on mood regulation using nonlinear techniques. During the first part of her talk, she will discuss (i) the concept of mood regulation; (ii) the underlying architecture of mood regulation in healthy volunteers, mood disorders patients and unaffected first-degree relatives; (iii) the importance of integrating tools from other fields (e.g., Physics, Mathematics) into Medicine. During the second part of her talk, she will discuss her work using wearable devices in bipolar disorder and their potential to advance our understanding of the illness.

Biography:

Dr. Ortiz completed her medical training in Mexico and her postgraduate studies at McGill University and Dalhousie University. She is currently the Head of the Bipolar Integrated Care Pathways at CAMH and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychiatry. Clinically, Dr. Ortiz has worked both on acute inpatient units and as a subspecialist in a tertiary Mood Disorders Program.

Her research focuses on understanding mood regulation and forecasting episodes in mood disorders using nonlinear techniques. She is developing robust methodological methods to characterize clinical trajectories in mood disorders using wearable devices.

For her work, Dr. Ortiz has been presented with more than 15 awards in her career, including the Samuel Gershon Award by the International Society of Bipolar Disorders, the Young Investigator by the International Society of Affective Disorders, Travel Award by the Society for Biological Psychiatry, as well as the Academic Scholar Award by the University of Toronto, among others.

More recently, one of her papers won the 2019 award for the best paper published in Bipolar Disorders. She has also secured national and international funding as a Principal Investigator from the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) for her work on episode prediction.

Dr. Ortiz has a young family, enjoys opera and is a yoga instructor.

Click here to register

Traditional Land Acknowledgement

We wish to acknowledge this land on which the University of Toronto operates. For thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land.