The CLEAR Lab for Cyclical Neuroscience
CLarifying the Endocrinology of Acute Risk for distress, substance use, and suicide across the menstrual cycle.
University of Chicago
University of Chicago
Hormone sensitivity is an unusually strong brain response to ordinary hormone shifts, and it can drive severe depression, irritability, suicide risk, and harmful substance use.
What we do
The DASH-MC framework, Dimensional Affective Sensitivity to Hormones, maps why some people are sensitive to estradiol (E2), progesterone (P4), or both, while most are unaffected. We think about hormone sensitivity across disorders, not only in PMDD.
Our phase-aligned cycle time scaling (PACTS) approach, implemented in our open-source menstrualcycleR R package, realigns hormonal cycles across patients and months. Generalized additive models can be used to model average, subgroup, and person-specific cycle effects.
We pair randomized crossover hormone trials with real-time symptom reports, neuroimaging, and passive smartphone data to isolate how estradiol (E2) and progesterone (P4) each drive risk, revealing distinct biological pathways we can target.
Jaclyn Ross also trained as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab and is listed under leadership above.
