Depression Treatment Laboratory

Dr. Ezawa is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Director of the Depression Treatment Laboratory at the University of Southern California. She completed her doctoral training at The Ohio State University, clinical internship at the University of California, San Diego/Veterans Affairs Consortium, and postdoctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Ezawa is primarily interested in the treatment of depression. In line with this interest, her research focuses on investigating how treatments for depression achieve their effects and how they can be adapted to meet the needs of different patients.

Rachel Bernstein is a first-year graduate student in the Clinical Science PhD program at USC. After completing her undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan, she worked as a post-bac research fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. In the Depression Treatment Laboratory, Rachel is interested in leveraging technology to better understand psychotherapeutic mechanisms of change in the context of depressive and anxiety disorders. She hopes this knowledge will inform the development of scalable and personalized interventions for these disorders.

Anh Dao is a first-year graduate student in the Depression Treatment Laboratory at the University of Southern California. Anh graduated from Vanderbilt University with a B.A. in Medicine, Health, and Society and Psychology in 2021. Anh was an undergraduate honors student from 2019 to 2021 before becoming the manager of the Mood, Emotion, and Development lab from 2021 to 2023. Anh's research interests include the use of multi-method predictors of depression treatment response to individualize treatment selection, and understanding how client-therapist variables influence responses to interventions. In her free time, Anh enjoys taking pictures of her duck, Mimi, creating potato art, and trying different sweets.

Francisco Ramos is the lab manager of the Depression Treatment Laboratory at the University of Southern California. He is interested in studying the development of accessible, evidence-based interventions for mental health disorders, particularly major depressive disorder and social anxiety disorder. He hopes to further investigate the implementation of new technologies (e.g. the metaverse) in mental health services and how such interventions may be made accessible for underserved populations, particularly Latine communities.