Academic Year Culture, Mind & Brain Speaker Series
During the academic year, the Culture, Mind and Brain Program hosts a speaker series.
Awais Aftab, MD
March 19th, 2026
Awais Aftab is a psychiatrist in Cleveland, Ohio (USA) and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University. Psychiatry at the Margins is his Substack newsletter about exploring critical, philosophical, and scientific debates in psychiatric practice and the psy-sciences. In 2025, he was profiled by the Lancet Psychiatry and described as “one of the discipline’s foremost public intellectuals.” His book Conversations in Critical Psychiatry, an edited volume of interviews, was published by Oxford University Press in 2024. Areas of Interest: Philosophy of Psychiatry, Critical Psychiatry, Psychopharmacology, Psychiatric Nosology, and History of Psychiatry.
Alexey Tolchinsky, PsyD
January 22nd, 2026
Alexey Tolchinsky, PsyD is a psychologist in private practice licensed in Maryland and authorized to provide telehealth services in 40 states. He earned my Psy.D. in Professional Psychology from the George Washington University in 2015.
His clinical experience includes working in a psychiatric hospital, school for at-risk adolescents, crisis center, various outpatient clinics, and a neurology clinic. Currently, he sees patients in private practice. He became an Adjunct Professor at GWU in 2024 to supervise the doctoral students in clinical psychology. He is a Clinical Fellow of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Association (NPSA), a member of the Maryland Psychological Association, International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociations, Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Life Sciences, Psychotherapy Action Network, and The New Washington School of Psychiatry. His research interests includes the application of non-linear dynamical systems to the theories of consciousness and psychopathology, as well as active inference, narrative fallacy, trauma, dissociative experiences, and OCD.
Junko Kitanaka, PhD
August 28th, 2025
Junko Kitanaka is a professor of medical anthropology in the Department of Human Sciences at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan. Kitanaka has been awarded five awards, mainly for her work on depression with the book titled Depression in Japan: psychiatric cures for a society in distress (2012, Princeton University Press), including the prestigious American Anthropological Association’s Francis Hsu Prize in 2013. The book has been translated into French, Japanese, Persian and Korean (and parts of it in Chinese). She has been featured in global media including New York Times, The New Yorker, and BBC, CNN, and Danish, German, and French national TV. She is a member of Japan’s Science Council and has served on numerous journal editorial boards including BioSocieties, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and Cultural Anthropology and is an associate editor for Transcultural Psychiatry. She is also part of the editorial team for Case Studies in Global Social Medicine to be featured in the Lancet. Her articles include: “The social in psychiatries,” with Ecks, S. and Wu. H. Lancet, 28 May 2021; “Depression.” Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, with S. Ecks. 2021, and “Depression as a Problem of Labor,” Sadness or Depression?, J. Wakefield & S. Demazeux eds. Springer, 2016. Her work on dementia, preventive psychiatry, and the neuropsychiatrization of the lifecycle has appeared as “In the Mind of Dementia,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 34(1), 2020, which has been translated into Spanish.
Lan Li, PhD
March 27th, 2025
Lan Li is a historian of the body, focusing on medicine and health in global East Asia. Li's research engages with topics related to anatomical representation, theory and practice in Asian medicine, histories of acupuncture-moxabustion in neuroscience, and the relationship between medical education and race and racism in health care access. Li's Ph.D. was in History, Anthropology, and Science Technology and Society Studies from MIT in 2016. Li served as a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University before joining the medical humanities program and department of history faculty at Rice University.
Veronika Dudarev, PhD
November 7th, 2024
Veronika Dudarev is a Research Associate in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. She works with James T. Enns, Daniela Palombo, Connor Kerns, and Tim Oberlander. She studies social cognition – the mental processes that let us coordinate with others, like having a conversation without talking over each other or clinking glasses without breaking them. She is especially interested in how this general concept of “social cognition” can be broken down into sub-processes, to understand why the same factor influences joint actions in some situations but not in others. By identifying these building blocks, she hopes to understand not only how social interactions work, but also how people differ in their approaches. Do we all handle interactions in the same basic way, or are there different approaches that can be equally successful – or, in the context of human relationships, fulfilling?