Email

bijanki@bcm.edu

Positions

Associate Professor

Neurosurgery (Primary), Psychiatry (Joint), Neuroscience (Joint)
Director of Intracranial Monitoring Research
Baylor College of Medicine
Houston, TX US

Addresses

Main Baylor (Office)

BCM-Smith Medical Research Bldg
Room: BCMS-S101D
Houston, TX 77030
United States
Lab Website

Education

Postdoctoral Fellowship at Emory University

03/2016 - Atlanta, Georgia United States

Neuromodulation/Neurobiology

PhD from University of Iowa

12/2011 - Iowa City, Iowa United States

Cognitive Neuroscience/Neuroimaging

Graduate Certificate at Emory University

05/2018 - Atlanta

Clinical and Translational Research, Biostatistics

Selected Publications

• Bijanki, K.R., Manns, J.R., ... Mayberg, H.S., Willie, J.T. "Cingulum stimulation enhances positive affect and anxiolysis to facilitate awake craniotomy." Journal of Clinical Investigation. 2018; Pubmed PMID: 30589643
• Bijanki, K.R., Matsui, J.T., Mayberg, H.S., Magnotta, V.A., Arndt, S., Johnson, H.J., Nopoulos, P., Paradiso, S., McCormick, L., Fiedorowicz, J.G., Epping, E.A., Moser, D.J. "Depressive symptoms related to low fractional anisotropy in the right ventral anterior cingulate in older adults with atherosclerotic vascular disease." Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.; Pubmed PMID: 26236221
• Bijanki, K.R., Hodis, B., Brumm, M., Harlynn, E, McCormick, L.M. "Hippocampal and subcallosal cingulate atrophy in psychotic depression.." PLoS ONE.; Pubmed PMID: 25338068
• Bijanki, K.R., Kovach, C., McCormick, L.M., Kawasaki, H., Dlouhy, B., Feinstein, J., Jones, R.D., Howard, M. "Case report: Stimulation of the right amygdala produces transient changes in affective bias." Brain Stimulation.; Pubmed PMID: 24972588

Funding

Novel strategies for mapping the emotional neural circuitry using human brain stimulation. - #NIH R21-A1-NS104953

$429,000.00 Grant funding from NINDS

This research seeks to gain a better understanding of the emotional correlates to limbic brain stimulation. We aim to use this information to help develop better methods to anticipate and prevent neuropsychiatric complications following brain surgery for epilepsy.

The human amygdala in social processing: circuits, physiology, behavior, and neuromodulation. - #NIH K01-A1 MH116364

$696,000.00 Grant funding from NIMH

The goal of this project is to provide critical training in electrophysiology, and to test the scientific premise that the amygdala is directly and causally involved in depression and social processing.

Mapping and modulating the spatiotemporal dynamics of socio-affective processing. - #NIH R01 MH127006

$3,602,360.00 (08/01/2021 - 05/31/2026)

Grant funding from NIMH

Socio-affective dysfunction underlies myriad neuropsychiatric diseases; prior efforts to develop neuromodulation paradigms for treatment-resistant cases of neuropsychiatric diseases characterized by socio-affective dysfunction have fallen short, in part due to an absence of defined neural dysfunctional-state signals. The overall goal of this R01 proposal is to map the spatiotemporal dynamics of social affective processing and to examine selective modulation of these dynamics in humans undergoing invasive intracranial monitoring for treatment-resistant epilepsy and depression. We leverage first-in-human intracranial neural recording opportunities created by a novel therapeutic platform termed “stereotactic electroencephalography-informed deep brain stimulation” (stereo-EEG-informed DBS; Parent Study UH3-NS103549), as well as the powerful platform of intracranial stereotactic recording and stimulation in patients undergoing epilepsy surgical evaluation to establish the precise structural, functional, and causal properties of the affective salience network as a circuit substrate underlying social processing.

Languages

American Sign Language, Spanish