University of Iowa postdoctoral fellow Maddie Mocchi, PhD, has won a 2026 Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. The two-year, $70,000 grant helps promising young scientists launch careers in neuroscience and psychiatry, supporting either extended research fellowship training or starting a research lab as a junior faculty member. 

Mocchi works in the laboratory of Nick Trapp, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry and two-time Young Investigator awardee. As an INSPIRE fellow in the Department of Psychiatry in the UI Carver College of Medicine, Mocchi’s research examines the pupil as an indicator of depression severity. 

Her project “Deriving a Non-invasive Pupil Biomarker of Depression Severity from EEG and iEEG Neural Signatures,” seeks to validate a non-invasive measure of arousal, pupil activity, as a way to track and predict depression severity and treatment response. Early findings suggest that pupillary responses to a flash of light, and spontaneous changes in pupil size at rest, can both track and partially predict depression severity. This work builds on the recent identification of a neural biomarker of arousal recorded in emotion-processing brain regions of neurosurgical patients. 

UI researchers have a strong track record with the BBRF Young Investigator Award. With one exception, UI trainees or faculty members have won this award each year since 2018.