Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior

Rachel Keszycki graduated summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She started as a psychometrician her junior year of college, which fueled her interest in brain-behavior relationships and led her to pursue her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine with an emphasis in clinical neuropsychology. She was the first student in her program to be recruited with a research focus specializing in neuropathology and bench lab science. Her dissertation research synthesizes neuropsychological findings, behavioral neuroanatomy, and immunostaining and postmortem histopathologic analysis to investigate how amygdala pathology contributes to neuropsychiatric symptoms in dementia due to frontotemporal lobar degeneration, aiming to understand the role of regional vulnerability in clinical phenotypes in neurodegenerative diseases. She received various grants to support her work, including an NINDS T32 and NIA NRSA F31. During her clinical psychology pre-doctoral internship year at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Rachel worked with Dr. Louisa Thompson to investigate associations between retinal biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive performance and to characterize associations between digital clock drawing performance and imaging biomarker correlates of Alzheimer’s and cerebrovascular disease. She presented the latter at Brown’s annual Mind Brain Research Day and was awarded a second-place prize for her poster. After Brown, Rachel will be pursuing a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in clinical neuropsychology at the Northwestern Mesulam Center for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s disease. She is incredibly grateful to her family, fiancé, friends, colleagues, and mentors for their support.