Marija Kundakovic

Marija Kundakovic, PharmD, PhD,  is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Fordham University. Her lab focuses on hormonal and environmental factors driving sex differences in depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders. 

Kundakovic received her PharmD and completed her MSc in experimental pharmacology at the University of Belgrade, Serbia. She then received her PhD 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. More recently, Kundakovic’s lab established the postmortem tissue biomarkers to study cellular and molecular changes in the human brain across the menopausal transition. Her research has been published in top-tier scientific journals and is funded by multiple grants from the National Institute of Mental Health. She is an elected member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology and an executive committee member of the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences. Kundakovic is an internationally sought-after speaker.