Dr. Daphne J. Holt is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Director of the Resilience and Prevention Program (RAPP) and the Emotion and Social Neuroscience Laboratory, and Co-Director of the Psychosis Clinical and Research Program, at MGH.

Dr. Holt attended medical school at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, where she also received a PhD in neurobiology. She received her training in adult psychiatry in the Massachusetts General/McLean Hospital Adult Psychiatry Residency Program, becoming a faculty member of the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatry Department in 2004, where she has been ever since. 

Dr. Holt is the founding director of a clinical and research program (RAPP) that focuses on developing tools and interventions that can measure and reduce risk for neuropsychiatric illness. To date, this program has developed and tested resilience-building interventions for college students, middle school-aged adolescents and healthcare providers, using a range of innovative delivery approaches including virtual reality. This work has applied Dr. Holt’s pioneering “transdiagnostic” approach to prevention for mental health. In addition, the basic research of Dr. Holt’s laboratory focuses on understanding the neural basis of emotional function and social behavior, and alterations in these domains in people who are affected by or at risk for mental illness. Recently her research has aimed to bring together what is known about the neurocognitive underpinings of risk for mental illness and ways to reduce this risk.

She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in journals such as JAMA Psychiatry, Molecular Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, the Journal of Neuroscience, NeuroImage Clinical, Neuroscience, The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychological Medicine, Schizophrenia Bulletin among others. Her research has been continuously supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH; Dr. Holt has been principal investigator of four NIMH RO1 grants during the past six years), the Rappaport Foundation, the Sidney R. Baer, Jr. Foundation, the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, the MGH Executive Committee on Research (as the recipient of the Claflin Award and the MGH Research Scholar Award) and the McCance Center for Brain Health. Her work has also been highlighted by the mainstream media, including Boston.com, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Scientific American.