Monica Uddin is a Professor in USF’s College of Public Health, where she is an active contributor to the Genomics Program housed in the Center for Global Health and Infectious Disease Research. The goal of work in the Uddin research group is to identify genetic and epigenetic predictors of stress-related mental disorders, with a particular focus on depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. A central theme of this work is the recognition that lived experience has a substantial impact on risk for mental disorders, and that this risk is likely mediated in part by changes to genomic biology; accordingly, we seek to develop biomarkers of risk prediction that take into account aspects of lived experience, such as early life adversity and cumulative traumatic burden, that are known to influence susceptibility to depression and related disorders, with the ultimate goal helping to inform interventions that reduce the burden of mental illness.