Marija Kundakovic is associate professor of biological sciences at Fordham University. Her lab focuses on hormonal and environmental factors driving sex differences in depression, anxiety and substance use disorders.
She received her Pharm.D. and completed her M.Sc. in experimental pharmacology at the University of Belgrade. She then received her Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular genetics from the University of Illinois Chicago and completed her postdoctoral training at Columbia University and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. In 2015, she was awarded a NARSAD Young Investigator Award by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation and established her research laboratory at Fordham University.
Kundakovic has been at the forefront of psychiatric epigenetics research since early in her career. Her lab discovered sex-specific epigenetic regulation in the female brain as a function of the ovarian cycle, providing a new molecular framework to study the female-specific susceptibility to psychiatric disorders. Kundakovic’s research is funded by the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health. She is an elected member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology and a council member of the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences.
