Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery
Appointed McNair Scholar February 2024
Dr. Nicole Provenza is an assistant professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine studying the neurophysiology underlying cognition and emotion and the effects of neuromodulation on neural activity and behavior. Dr. Provenza completed her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at Brown University, where she focused on identifying neural biomarkers of distress in patients with treatment-resistant obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Her recent work analyzing chronic and continuous intracranial recordings in OCD patients revealed a neural biomarker of clinical response after deep brain stimulation.
The Provenza Lab’s long-term goals are to gain an ethologically valid understanding of how the brain supports real-world behavior. The lab integrates neural activity and deep phenotyping approaches to inform neural signatures underlying real-world functional deficits in cognitive and emotional disorders. This improved understanding will allow us to pioneer the development of bespoke stimulation strategies that more effectively guide brain activity and behavior toward healthy states.
