Revolutionizing Mental Health Diagnosis and Treatment with Dr. Jennifer Perusini

As you said, prevention is— would be great for mental health disorders. This is a little bit more different to prevent because you can never really predict when a traumatic event may happen. And there's definitely risk factors involved, like problematic childhood or no support system. But in terms of preventative measures that can be taken, it's really difficult. But that's sort of where we come in, where We see this protein increase in our rodents happen within 24 hours of the traumatic event, and that's a far cry from the 30 days that's required. So if we can intervene before the 30 days, right when we see this increase, then we can get the treatments necessary and hopefully mitigate symptoms before they even really manifest and, you know, full-fledged.

Welcome to RxChill Pill, the podcast that strengthens your resilient mind every time you listen to the extraordinary stories, expert tips, and meditations to elicit your relaxation response, the antidote to your stress response. I'm Dr. Juna Bobby MD. I'm a physician and mom specializing in mind-body and lifestyle medicine. Find out more about me, my personalized online courses on procrastination and mindset coaching for kids teens, and adults at mindbodyspace.com.

Hello everyone. I'm so excited today to welcome Dr. Jennifer Perazzini. She's a neuroscientist and entrepreneur, and she's the founder and chief executive officer of Neurovation Labs. Dr.

Perazzini made the groundbreaking discovery that there's a physiologic component to post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. She's gonna break it down for us today. She's also going to talk about how she works with the Air Force and her work with an innovative yoga program called Neuro Yoga.

And she's going to talk to us about how she became interested in neuroscience and her advice for girls who are interested in STEM. If you're a woman interested in STEM or you have kids interested in science, tech, engineering, and math, go get them and listen to this episode together. Dr. Perazzini earned her BA in neuroscience and behavior at Barnard College, Columbia University, and PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied the mechanisms underlying PTSD. For her postdoctoral fellowship work at Columbia University in the Department of Psychiatry and Integrative Neuroscience, she focused on models of aging and Alzheimer's disease. She's on the board of directors of Women in Learning, a national 501 nonprofit organization dedicated to the support and advancement of women in science. She's also a lecturer and teaching associate in the psychology departments at both UCLA and Barnard College. Hi, Dr. Perazzini. Jennifer, how are you?

Good. How are you?

Thank you so much for being here today with us.

Of course. I'm so happy to be here.

Can you explain to us in layman's terms what it is that you discovered and what your lab Neurovation does? And what does that mean to like the normal person?

Yeah.

And then after that, I want you to give the neuroscientist explanation.

So my company, Neurovation Labs, we're developing the first objective diagnostic and companion treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. Wow.

So let's break that down. What is an objective diagnostic tool. What does that mean?

Yeah. So with any mental health disorder right now, there are no objective tools, which means there's no concrete analysis or indicator to tell if someone has a disorder.

And so let me break that down even more. Like, it's like when we measure blood pressure on someone, right? And we can say, hey, you have high blood pressure. There's nothing like that for mental issues.

Right. I was going to use the example of, of cancer. You know, we can test, we can see a tumor and we can tell, you know, if someone has, has cancer or not. It's very different for mental health disorders. We're just starting to scratch the surface on different biomarkers, which means indicators of a disease that could potentially be targeted to treat it.

So that is fascinating. So for people who don't know what a biomarker is, that's like something you would draw on their blood. And you would check for something, a protein.

Right. So in my case, it's a brain scan.

Okay.

But, but same sort of thing. It's basically an indicator of a disease that can predict different ways to treat it, but doesn't necessarily predict any other disease. So high blood pressure is associated with PTSD, but it doesn't necessarily indicate PTSD. PTSD. Could mean I just went for a jog. So what I did when I was in grad school is I actually worked with a rodent model of PTSD and studied all different mechanisms in the brain, what's going on. And we actually found a protein in the fear center of the brain that's increased, and we see it across the board, and we're able to actually target that protein to get rid of the symptoms.

And so that's incredible.

The company. So we, we can use this protein to diagnose PTSD in a brain scan, and then we're also targeting that protein to make a treatment.

So how do you see that protein on the brain scan for— Right. Can you explain that? Yeah.

So that's, that's what we're, we're working on now. This is, this is another difficult, uh, part. So, um, we're working on a brain scan, a PET scan. So what that means is you get a tracer. If you ever had an MRI, like a contrast dye in your arm. Um, but our contrast dye actually targets the protein. So it'll go up to your brain and then we can put you in a scanner and we can visualize it. And if we see increased levels, that means that you may have PTSD.

So you have a specific tag that goes to the specific protein. And so you inject that into people's blood with— into their vein with a radioactive marker so that that radioactive particle is tagged with this specific molecule that you're adding to that. That's going to go and tag the specific protein that is associated with PTSD in your brain.

Right.

So when you do that PET scan, the positron emission tomography, that picks up that radio tracer. Am I saying it right?

That is a perfect explanation. Okay. And that's exactly what we're doing in the company right now. We're developing that specific radioactive tracer. It's a new molecule and it's gonna go right to our protein that we're interested in.

Wow. So, so that new molecule you develop, is it a man-made molecule? Right.

So we're synthesizing that in the lab.

Wow. And so because when you did this in grad school, it was on rats, rodents, right? And so you were able to dissect their brain and look for this protein, right? After you traumatize the poor rats. I'm not sure how you traumatize them. How did you do that?

So, um, the rodent model that we had, um, was mild and unpredictable foot shocks. It wasn't painful, it was just startling, um, and uncontrollable. So those are the big characteristics of a traumatic event that may cause PTSD.

And those two things are uncontrollable and painful?

And startling.

Startling. Okay.

May or may not be painful in real life, but ours was not painful.

But you have already seen in people with PTSD this increase in protein, right, in their fear center. So you mean the amygdala, right?

So yes, the amygdala. So actually, that's a really good point that you bring up. We have never before been able to measure this protein in a live person before. And so what we have is measurements by proxy. So the protein that we found Actually is incredibly important for cell activity and cell firing. And this all leads to memories being formed. And so what we see in human patients is an increased amygdala activity scenario. So we can measure that, but we've never before been able to measure the actual protein.

So you still haven't measured the actual protein, but you've seen the increase, or you have measured the protein now? In the amygdala?

So we see it in rodents and we see increased activity in human patients. And this protein that we're targeting is, is conserved. It's evolutionarily conserved. It's a very old protein. Important.

What is it called?

It's called GluA1. It's part of the glutamate system. It's a subunit of a receptor. And so glutamate is the number one chemical messenger that is for cell activity and cell communication. And so that's really the system that we're targeting. It's, it's conserved from rodents, mice, humans, even, even worms.

So this thing increases when you have the fear center activated, right?

So what we see in general, in, you know, a normal scenario where something might be scary, we'll see a little bit of an increase, but it'll go back down to normal within 72 hours at most.

Okay.

What we see with our, uh, PTSD rodents is a long-term increase, the lifespan of the animal essentially. And so that's really the key difference. It's something that when rye that's holding this fear center of the brain, the amygdala, really at this high activity level, and that makes sense. Based on what we see in patients.

Okay, so now you've been working with the Air Force.

Yes.

On this. That's so amazing. Yes. So tell us about that.

Sure. Yeah, we received a contract from them in late December of 2019, right before all the craziness of the world happened.

Yeah.

And so we're contracted with them. We have sponsors there that They're really funding us to get our research and development completed so we can get to clinical trials as fast as possible.

Fantastic. So you are actually working with people who have PTSD, right?

Not directly right now. It's so prevalent in the military that everybody knows somebody that's, that's suffering. And so it's such an important problem that they want to solve.

Right.

And so we're very lucky. They tend to not necessarily fund medical or biotech companies because it's such a nebulous area. But, um, but here we are, and they know it's such a big problem to solve.

Amazing. So we had spoken before, and you mentioned something so fascinating to me, that if you are able to target, um, this area, this activity, before it becomes PTSD full-blown, right, that you may be able to actually prevent PTSD from taking its hold, a foothold in the brain. Yeah, that is fascinating to me.

Yeah, this is something that we're exploring, um, and it's really— a lot of it's based on semantics. So unfortunately, right now, the only way that PTSD can be diagnosed is with symptom checklists.

Okay, so can you explain to them what semantics mean?

Yeah, this— it's just, it's just wordsmithing in, um, in the diagnostic manual. So what What's in the diagnostic manual right now is that symptoms must be present for at least 30 days. Okay, that is a long time to suffer.

And what are the symptoms? Can you clarify? Because everybody talks about PTSD. Oh, I have PTSD from gym class or, or my boss. So what exactly really is PTSD?

Right. So some of the symptoms include hypervigilance, Um, uh, increased startle response, um, just hyper-reactivity. And then there's other, um, overlapping, um, symptoms like depressive episodes and, you know, inability to, to function in daily life, which you see across the board in a lot of different depression and anxiety disorders. So it does get a little confusing.

And is there, is there that typical replaying of that traumatic event? Does that really happen?

That's another, yeah. So there's a reimagining of the traumatic event, nightmares and, and things like that. And so that's, that's really what we've been trying to model even in our PTSD models, really just to hit all of these things that increase startle, the hyper-reactivity.

So like vigilant about everything, like, right?

So like just worried and we always reacting of the soldier that comes back from a war zone and there's a car backfire or a loud noise and goes into a fear response. Um, things like, things like that. And that's typical. And really the number one thing that must happen, and PTSD is a, a class of its own this way, is that you must have a traumatic event occur before any of these symptoms happen. Um, that's why it's so difficult to really pinpoint different genetic components, because as, as you said, prevention is— would be great for mental health disorders. This is a little bit more different, um, to, to prevent, because you can never really predict when a traumatic event may, may happen. And there's definitely risk factors involved, like, um, a problematic childhood or no support system, but In terms of preventative measures that can be taken, it's, it's really difficult, but that's sort of where we come in, where we see this protein increase in our rodents happen within 24 hours of the traumatic event. And that's a far cry from the 30 days that's, that's required. So yeah, we can intervene before the 30 days, right when we see this, this increase, we can get the treatments necessary and hopefully mitigate symptoms before they even really manifest and, you know, full-fledged.

Wow, that is so amazing. So 30 full days and it has to interfere with your daily life.

Exactly.

Basically, and like a lot of diagnoses, but we'd like to prevent it before it gets to that point, right? So in your ideal world, you would know that somebody had a traumatic event and perhaps be able to measure this, is it GluA1? Yeah. Yeah. So you would be able to measure GluA1 and see if there's increased activity. And if there is, you may be able to give it an antidote. Is that what you're saying? To keep it from repeating itself?

Exactly.

Exactly. Wow.

We were able to do that.

It's like a sci-fi movie.

We were able to do that in our, in our rodents with a drug that isn't necessarily specific to the amygdala. We were able to infuse it in. And we saw complete reversal of all symptoms, but not anything scary. No, no bad side effects like amnesia for the trauma. We want to be scared of that traumatic content.

Yes, I was going to ask you that next.

Right.

Yeah, I was going to ask you that next because if you have a traumatic event, you don't want to forget it. Exactly. Exactly.

So you—

so maybe— yeah, that's how we learn. That's how we learn. And and maybe you take action because of the traumatic event, like post-traumatic growth.

Exactly. That's so— that's so—

you're saying that intervening will not get rid of the memory. However, it will hopefully prevent this debilitating PTSD that interferes with daily life.

It basically throws a wrench in the system and stops us from spiraling out of control to that hypervigilant state all the time.

Wow. That is fascinating. Okay. Amazing work. Can you now also talk to us about this work that you're doing with neuro yoga?

Oh yeah. I'm actually not even close to being a yogi, um, at all. So I did meet, um, the founder of neuro yoga, Jonathan. Yes.

And he, um, Jonathan was my, one of my medical students at NYU School of Medicine. I met him when I was teaching resilience there, and I had taken my 200-hour yoga training at Dharma Yoga, and they was, they would always say, you have to meet Jonathan, you have to meet Jonathan. I was like, who is this Jonathan? And sure enough, fall, I show up at NYU and there he is in one of my lunch and learns.

Yeah, no, he's He's so great.

Yeah. So how did you meet him?

I met him through a mutual friend, someone that I actually was in grad school with. She was a postdoc while I was a grad student. She's in New York now, too. And she said, you got to meet this guy, Jonathan, because I had just started a new nonprofit for PTSD wellness right before the pandemic. So the worst timing you could possibly have. But we met, we really hit it off, and I thought it would be great to incorporate some of his yoga programs into our group for the time being, because everything was virtual. There was nothing else. We couldn't throw any fundraisers, nothing like that. Not yet anyway. And so we hosted a couple events together, really just focusing on doing yoga, but also how the brain changes with yoga.

Uh-huh. And he actually puts them on a monitor, right? What, what is he doing, measuring their pulse?

Yeah, so we— back when things were in person, uh, yes, he used to be able to do little experiments, and we did try to do that as well, um, more visual cues that you'd fill out beforehand. Um, and it was really exciting. People got really into the data. Um, nothing meant anything, you know, it was just a simple little experiment, but I think people really like to see that what they're doing in terms of wellness or even, you know, taking a medication works and how it works on your brain and body.

So, um, so the whole biofeedback is powerful.

Exactly. So yeah, he's, he's great. I hope to run more events with him in, in the near future, hopefully in person, hoping one day.

Um, I'm gonna have to have him on this podcast to explain more of exactly what he does. Yeah. So how did you get into science? And were you always interested as a young kid?

Yes. Yeah, I've always been, I've always been, you know, wanting to get my hands dirty.

Okay. How did you— what sparked your interest in neuroscience?

So, you know, in neuroscience, I always was completely in love with neuroscience and psychology. Once I got to college and taking, you know, my bio classes and everything. I always wanted to do medical research. In high school, I loved being in a lab. Like I said, I loved getting my hands dirty. It's my favorite part of school. And, you know, my professors really helped me sort of figure out how to go about that. Like, what did I want to accomplish in terms of research? They helped me really join some labs. Both— I went to Barnard undergrad, so both at Barnard and Columbia University varsity, all those different labs, really to hone in on my interests. But I think that my, my interest in neuroscience, um, or really PTSD and coping mechanisms, developed well before college. Um, really a very, you know, personal story that I'm happy to share because it, you know, it really inspired me.

Yeah.

So 2001 was like my original 2020 disaster of a year. I was 13. It was the year my life really got flipped, turned upside down. First with 9/11. I grew up a New Yorker right outside of Manhattan. And then the death of my grandfather, mother, and even my dog happened all in the same month.

Oh my gosh.

I'm so sorry.

No, it's okay. But 19 years later, and I still— this time is so surreal. It's weird. Sometimes I don't even know how to necessarily cope with all the feelings. Every year is a little different, I tell people. So I ask for some grace always. But, you know, with our—

So you lost your mom when you were 13?

Right.

That's such a developmentally difficult time as it is. Yeah.

And I had two younger siblings and my dad who had no idea what to do.

Oh, are you all girls?

No. I have a sister and a younger brother.

Okay, well, I'm so sorry to hear that. I'm sorry to— no, no, interrupt, go on.

No, it's okay. But, you know, from, from that, you know, even watching people in my town who lost so many loved ones in 9/11— I grew up in Rockland County, which had one of the highest numbers of first responders lost in 9/11— but I watched people around me and my family and in my community cope with the loss of their loved ones in And some did it really well and some had very aberrant coping mechanisms from failing school to drug use. And I wanted to know what in the brain made this happen. I mean, that's the honest truth. Why did some of us cope so well and why did some of us, you know, go awry basically? And so taking those interests with me this whole time, even through college, that's when my professors really helped me figure out, you know, the lab situation, what I actually wanted to do and then helped me apply to my doctoral programs based on these interests. And that led me to my, my lab at UCLA, uh, where I, I did grad school, and that's where I started working with the PTSD model.

Amazing. So did you, um, how did you— so how did you deal with this trauma? I mean, you had some trauma, losing a mom at such a young age. How did you become resilient, and what was it you became curious about your own brain on how to survive this?

Yeah, I'm, you know, it's— I never classify this necessarily as a trauma. Um, I'm not sure why. I think there's a lot of things that, that go into it. I, I, I like to analyze everybody else but myself, but maybe I should try one day, figure it out. But, um, no, I think, um, I had such an amazing support system, even when my dad necessarily— he couldn't necessarily figure out how to take care of us. And not that he didn't take care of us, but figure out, you know, he's losing his way too. And, you know, I had both, um, you know, sets of grandparents. When my grandmother and my grandfather passed away, or before that, um, we were all sort of coping together and helping each other out. And I really, really just focused on school and my sister and brother and taking care of them. Which sounds crazy as a 13-year-old, but I think, you know, I went to school the same day as my mother's funeral and it's just, what was I supposed to do? Sit home and cry? You know, I mean, I felt like life had to go on. You know, we were still alive and we had to, you know, she would've been devastated if she saw, you know, that we fell apart. And I just felt like I couldn't let that happen, you know? Sort of became the matriarch overnight. But, um, yeah, I mean, I think, I think I had a lot of growth happen, um, like post-traumatic growth. Yeah, maybe.

Um, so you took that adverse event and turned it into like sort of a mission of you're interested in other people's brains now.

Yeah, I mean, that developed definitely over time. It wasn't, you know, an overnight thing, but it was, it was just me being a very very observant kid always, and seeing how, you know, in high school some of the people that lost their brothers, sisters, parents really turned to drugs and alcohol and, you know, didn't, didn't care about school. And I was just the complete opposite, you know.

So you turned towards school?

I turned towards school, and I think, I think I had to grow up fast. I think that was another thing, um, because I had to really help my sister and brother, um, get through everything and I became an adult overnight, you know, trying to help my dad. Um, and that made me see things, I think, from a different perspective. Like, everything else was just frivolous, you know, going out was frivolous. And I just— I, I wanted to do well for myself and for my family.

And, um, what are your resilience coping mechanisms then and now? Do you have anything you turn to?

Um, things definitely, definitely progressed. I feel like I had not, not necessarily a relapse, but I felt like in college, you know, right before I was, um, going to move to UCLA, actually to move out to LA for grad school, I really sort of had something of a breakdown. I started feeling very guilty, like, for leaving my family. And, you know, I, I definitely turned to therapy, um, which I'm always proud to admit. I think it's it's always important to talk about things.

Okay.

And so that's what I try to do now, much to the dismay of my husband. I like to react first when something upsets me. You know, I like to almost yell about it and get it out. It's almost cathartic. And then I start to rationalize things.

Uh-huh.

So I kind of do my own therapy on myself.

So you like use cognitive therapy on yourself?

A little bit.

A little bit.

I just need to scream at the wall and then, and then pull it together.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, I like that. You let it all out.

Exactly.

Okay. And then, and then you talk to yourself.

Yeah, I try to rationalize things and, you know, why are you upset? Why are you reacting this way? What good can come out of it? Um, you know, and that's, that's something that I really learned to do even, you know, 9, 10 years later after all, all of this happened. To me working through therapy was, um, even though something's bad, not everything that comes out of it is bad. Um, and so I learned not to feel guilty about having a good life after that. Um, you know, I sometimes think that if my mom never passed away, um, and this didn't happen to me, I wouldn't have, um, pushed to get into the college I wanted to go to or, or move away from my family, which I was the first to ever do that. And family. And now we had, uh, all the women, all, all the, the girl cousins in the family are now pursuing PhDs and moving away from home. So, uh, I started, started a little trend.

So you were the first PhD in the family?

Yeah, in the family.

Congratulations, trailblazing.

But, but that was sort of important for me to set that precedent, I think, and, um, you know, use bad things to grow. It's not— you don't have to feel guilty for it.

Okay, that's wonderful. And what do you do to take care of yourself? Do you exercise? You don't do yoga, you said.

Jonathan, you do any exercise? Yeah, no, I love to run. It's very cathartic for me. Ran every day of this lockdown, and it was the only thing, you know, keeping me afloat, I feel like. And I need to be— my husband jokes that I'm like a dog. I need to be taken out for a run and I calm down.

So you get like the physical aspect.

Yes. So I need to do that. Otherwise, you know, it's hard because I love work so much. I love what I do. So I'm not the best person to ask how to unwind.

No, I think that's great. No, I mean, like, if you love your work, I mean, I love my work and it's just— for me, it's a stress relief kind of. But I do have to tear myself away sometimes because I get so stuck in it.

Right, right. So on the weekends, I try to set aside time for, you know, date night. We love wine. We love— we used to love traveling around the world to go to different wine regions. So, you know, we'll try some new things and just, you know, try to keep it fun, you know, try to— my husband's my best friend, so we try to do everything together on the weekends. And just, it's good to have a balance, I think.

That sounds wonderful. Is he in the sciences?

No. No, no, he's a lawyer.

Okay, nice balance.

Yeah, not even close.

So I know that you support women in STEM, right?

So you're a board member of Women in Learning. Yes, that's, uh, my favorite group. Uh, we recently became a nonprofit about 2 years ago, uh, but the group is 10 years old.

Wow.

And it was founded by someone in the lab I was in for grad school. She was a grad student with me, and we really watched it grow. People love it. It started, you know, we've had our first luncheon basically at this conference that's typically very old white male. Not that they're not supportive, but we, we saw it and thought things needed to change. You know, we want to see more women presenters at this conference, and So we started hosting a luncheon every year, and every year we feature a new woman scientist just to talk about her life and her struggles and her kids and her husband and, you know, whatever, whatever she wanted to talk about, just to sort of humanize, you know, a female researcher and bring everybody back down to earth, you know, out of the science world and see that we're real people. And it became so popular. We have male and female supporters really across the spectrum, even people who aren't necessarily in neuroscience love to join the group. And we just had our 10th event. It was virtual this year, but we made it really fun and we had our highest attendance ever, actually, which was great.

Wow. I was going to ask you if you had a virtual one and I want to be invited too.

Yeah, no, we had a virtual one and we usually just do yearly events. We were going to do regional happy hours this year. But we're gonna have to put that— hopefully next year we can kick that off just to have more of an intimate experience. But, um, I think for now, this, uh, for the next few months, we're going to have, um, new features for grad students, female grad students.

So it's a monthly thing?

We're going probably monthly or quarterly. We're still working it out. I think our first one's in December, so I'll definitely send out a memo, but That's another thing we see. We want to give students a forum to be able to practice their talks and talk about their research really in a safe space. I think it could be very intimidating as a grad student to just start talking about science and being afraid of the ridicule.

And, um, what ridicule are you referring to?

Um, you know, I think it could be really tough doing a presentation in grad school, especially on your own data. Everybody's ready to ask you questions. Everybody wants to be the smartest person in the room. That's how we are as scientists.

They want to disprove you.

They want to disprove you. And if it's your first year of grad school and you're presenting something new and you're just proud that you were able to hold a rat for the first time, you know, just, you know, it isn't so much fun. But we want to make it fun. And that was— we had a different, um, format this year actually for our luncheon. It was more of a happy hour style, but we had a roundtable with many women scientists to talk about their struggles. And these are women that, you know, you can see on Twitter world and everything.

Yeah, I realized everybody's on Twitter.

Everybody's—

I had no idea. I had left Twitter like years ago because they have so much spam on there. Yeah, I see all the I mean, scientists and all the psychologists, and they're all on Twitter.

They're all on Twitter.

So I'm back now. Yeah. But it's hard to get back in there.

I know. I mean, everything—

But I follow all these people.

Yeah. It could be a very aggressive space, I think, with a lot of opinions flying around.

And a lot of misinformation too.

Exactly. So we wanted to sort of clear the air. And a lot of these researchers that you might think are super famous, read their papers in Nature, you know, they, they talked about their, their life and their struggles, even dealing with, you know, the COVID pandemic. Um, and the other portion that we had was letting, um, first-time speakers present. So, so these grad students, and, um, it, it was really fun for them.

I love it.

They really enjoyed it, and everybody was supportive in the chat. Everybody's like, way to go, you know. And that was— it was beautiful to see, honestly, because you don't necessarily get that feedback. It's, it's— I, I don't love virtual, um, I miss the connection. I think that's critical, you know, to network and to see people's reactions in real time. But that was something that I thought we gained from doing a virtual event, is you don't necessarily get that feedback, way to go, way to go, in the middle of speaking, right? So it was instant gratification, one little silver lining.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's fascinating. I love the format. Do you guys mentor younger kids, like high school kids or anything like that? Because it It sounds like an awesome idea to listen to all these women who are far ahead of them.

Yeah, we haven't. It's been mostly for grad school, postdoctoral fellowship, and undergrad a little bit, but we're open to anyone joining. I would love to start a program that mentors younger students, especially as we get back into in-person. I think that's so great to bring science into the lab so, you know, they can play with brains and see what it's like.

I love it. Thank you so much, Jennifer.

Yeah, of course.

Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for sharing, uh, your time and, uh, being such an innovator and a cheerleader for women in STEM.

I really appreciate it. Thank you for inviting me.

Yeah, I can't wait to see you again in person.

Yes, hopefully Soon.

Yes.

Well, that was fascinating, wasn't it?

To find out more about Dr.

Perazzini and Neurovation Lab, just go to mindbodyspace.com, click on the podcast page, and go to the episode for show notes and resources that we talked about in this podcast episode. While you're there on the website, you can download your free PDF for 3 Steps to Focused. Once you sign up, you'll be the first to know about new episodes and resources to get more resilient. Next up will be meditations inspired by Dr. Perazzini and Neurovation Lab. And next week's episode is with Mark Krasner, entrepreneur and founder of Expectful, the first of its kind meditation app for pregnant women and beyond. Until then, this is Dr. Juna signing off, wishing you and your loved ones wellness.