Congratulations to PhD candidate Megan Taylor Jones on the June 4 publication of “Symptom Provocation and Clinical Response to Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis” in JAMA Psychiatry, one of the top peer-reviewed journals in the field of psychiatry. Jones shares first-author credit for this paper with Daniel Bello, who graduated from Vanderbilt magna cum laude last month with bachelor’s degrees in Medicine, Health & Society and Neuroscience. The team also included SyBBURE Searle intern Ishaan Gadiyar (Class of 2026, majoring in molecular and cellular biology), associate professor of biostatistics Simon Vandekar, and colleagues affiliated with Harvard Medical School, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and McLean Hospital. The investigators worked with data from more than 70 randomized clinical trials to assess whether brain state affects clinical response to transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is used to treat major depressive disorder, obsessive-compulsive order, and nicotine dependence. Within its first two days of publication, the paper has been viewed nearly two thousand times and earned an Altmetric score of 46, and it is the subject of a VUMC News feature.
Jones is also first author of the software paper for RESI: An R Package for Robust Effect Sizes, published in the Journal of Statistical Software in March, with recent PhD graduate Kaidi Kang as co-author and Dr. Vandekar as senior author. Jones has presented on the same topic for the department’s 20th anniversary celebration poster session, at the Joint Statistical Meetings, and ENAR 2023; at ENAR 2025, she delivered a contributed talk on multivariate brain-wide association studies co-authored by PhD candidate Xinyu Zhang, Dr. Vandekar, and Carnegie Mellon associate professor Edward Kennedy. A graduate of the University of Kentucky’s School of Public Health, she was named Distinguished Teaching Assistant in 2024 and served as Lead TA during 2024–2025.
