Prechter Program Cochran

Amy Cochran, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor: Mathematics and Population Health Sciences Departments
University of Wisconsin

Biography

Amy joined the Prechter team in January 2015. She completed her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University in 2013 and was a T.H. Hildebrandt Research Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department at the University of Michigan. She is now a NIMH K01 awardee in Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the University of Wisconsin. Her research interests lie at the intersection of mathematics and psychiatry. She relies on a broad suite of applied math techniques, such as modeling, simulation, and statistics, to tackle problems in psychiatry. She is interested in describing (precisely with mathematics) mood changes on an individual patient basis. She hopes that this information can lead to personalized treatment of bipolar disorder which accounts for a patient's unique illness course. Her most recent project looks to systematically determine basic principles of how mood changes in bipolar I patients, e.g. whether mood fluctuates rhythmically. Future work aims to use smart-phone technology and mathematics to track mood in bipolar patients more precisely and in real time.