Mirelle (Elle) Kass

Mirelle “Elle” Kass is a clinical research coordinator for the Strategic Partnerships and Alliances team in the Center for Integrative Developmental Neuroscience (IDN) at the Child Mind Institute. She graduated cum laude from Connecticut College with a degree in behavioral neuroscience. For her honors thesis, she developed and validated a COVID-19 stress test to examine the effects of pandemic-related stress on autobiographical memory. Kass later completed Columbia University’s postbaccalaureate premedical program in preparation for a physician-scientist career.

Kass has authored multiple peer-reviewed publications, including a first-author chapter on Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorder in Kaplan & Sadock’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 11th Edition. She has also developed and teaches the Program for Learning R (PLR), an eight-week introductory course on coding, data wrangling, and data visualization in R. And since joining the Child Mind Institute, Kass has contributed to a wide range of initiatives led by the Science team — including the Pediatric Mental Health Screening and Assessment (PMHSA) project, the Youth Mental Health Academy (YMHA), the NIMH-funded Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) study, and the Nathan Kline Institute–Rockland Sample 2 (RS2).

In her current role, Kass leads and collaborates on studies focused on youth mental health, neurodevelopment, and digital psychiatry. Her work includes designing study protocols and conducting advanced data analyses using computational methods across diverse research projects.

As an aspiring physician-scientist, Kass is passionate about advancing translational research at the intersection of neuroscience and psychiatry to develop targeted, accessible interventions that improve youth mental health outcomes.

• BA, Behavioral Neuroscience, Connecticut College
• Premedical Certificate, Postbaccalaureate Premedical Program, Columbia University