Elle Kass

Elle Kass is a research projects coordinator and an associate research analyst at the Child Mind Institute. For the Youth Mental Health Academy, Elle primarily contributes to the program’s evaluation and research components but also supports the curriculum development, administrative, and internship and mentorship portions of the program. Her responsibilities include data analysis, study coordination and administration, and preparation of related manuscripts, presentations, and grant materials. She also developed the Program for Learning R, an 8-week course for research assistants and other employees to learn basic coding, data wrangling and simple data visualization using R, an open-sourced programming language for statistical computing and graphics.

Elle graduated cum laude from Connecticut College, with a bachelor’s degree in Behavioral Neuroscience. Her undergraduate thesis consisted of a study that explored how COVID-19 affects college students’ autobiographical memory specificity, as well as physiological and psychological stress responses. She previously was a Research Assistant at the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine, where she conducted sleep studies, analyzed sleep data and collaborated on peer-reviewed publications with Jamie Zeitzer, PhD. She has also worked at Pear Therapeutics, where she collaborated on the FDA approval of Somryst, the first FDA-approved prescription digital therapeutic for insomnia.

Elle currently attends Columbia University’s Post-Baccalaureate Pre-Medical Program in preparation for an MD-PhD in Neuroscience. Ultimately, she aims to contribute to the research that explores the neurological consequences of childhood trauma to improve trauma-related treatment options.

• B.A., Behavioral Neuroscience, Connecticut College