Michelle Freund, PhD

Michelle Freund, PhD, is the director of Strategic Data Initiatives at the Child Mind Institute.

Her independent research has studied the role of monoamine neurotransmitters in the action of antidepressant drugs and the interactions of stress and drug misuse. Dr. Freund has also worked in various capacities at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Prior to joining the Child Mind Institute, Dr. Freund served as the director of the HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study at NIH, which is the largest longitudinal study of early brain and child development in the United States. She was previously the deputy director of the Office of Technology Development and Coordination, where she managed a research portfolio of grants focused on the development of novel tools and technologies important for the advancement of basic and translational neuroscience. Additionally, Dr. Freund served as the director for the NIH NeuroBioBank, a network of six brain and tissue repositories that provide post-mortem human brain samples for research. She has been an active member of several trans-NIH interdisciplinary teams such as the NIH BRAIN Initiative and the Blueprint for Neuroscience.

In her current role, Dr. Freund oversees multiple data and research cores of the Child Mind Institute, each focused on providing reproducible scientific results to transform the lives of children and their families. Dr. Freund is also the director of innovations in Clinical Assessment and Interventions, part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Global Center for Child and Adolescent Mental Health. This initiative will build, test and deploy technologies to expand access to mental health care and research in low- and middle-income countries.

Through her work, Dr. Freund continues to champion the broad sharing of valuable data resources.

• Director, HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health
• Program Director, National Institutes of Health NeuroBioBank
• Chief, Neurotechnology Program, Office of Technology Development and Coordination, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health
• Assistant Professor, Department of Neurosurgery, Thomas Jefferson University College of Medicine
• Research Assistant Professor, Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, Drexel University College of Medicine
• Research Associate/Research Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania
• Assistant Editor, Nature Medicine

• Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers University

• PhD, Neuroscience, Hahnemann University in Philadelphia
• BA, Mammalian Physiology, the University of California, San Diego