Evan Iliakis, PhD

MD-PhD Candidate in Neuroscience, UPenn

Projects

Exploring avenues for increased access to care for borderline personality disorder

My most notable research experience prior to coming to Penn was in the lab of Dr. Lois Choi-Kain at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where I worked on various epidemiologic and meta-analytic studies (1) quantifying gap in treatment services for borderline personality disorder (BPD), (2) exploring avenues for increasing access to care for this prevalent and disabling disorder. We found that, in most countries studied, extensive training requirements for specialized psychotherapies for BPD limited the number of providers able to provide evidence-based care (Iliakis et al., 2019). Clinician training in more resource-efficient care models, such as generalist psychotherapies (e.g., Good Psychiatric Management or GPM), as well as provision of stepped care via e.g., Internet-mediated interventions, could help expand access to care for BPD. I presented my findings at various domestic and international conferences and published them in several papers. These findings have informed public health policy in such countries as Sweden, the Netherlands, and Australia. I helped organize a GPM training in collaboration with the Greek Psychiatric Association (ΕΨΕ) that was held in October 2019 in Athens, Greece.

  1. Iliakis EA, Sonley AKI, Ilagan GS, Choi-Kain LW. Treatment of borderline personality disorder: is supply adequate to meet public health needs? Psychiatr Serv 2019;70(9):772-781.
  2. Iliakis EA, Ilagan GS, Choi-Kain LW. Dropout rates from psychotherapy trials for borderline personality disorder: a meta-analysis. Personal Disord 2021;12(3):193.
  3. Finch EF, Iliakis EA, Masland SR, Choi-Kain LW. A meta-analysis of treatment as usual for borderline personality disorders. Personal Disord 2019;10(6):491.

Deconstructing stigma around borderline personality disorder in medical students

To address the stigmatization of borderline personality disorder (BPD) in medicine, I hosted a seminar series on borderline personality disorder in 2021 in my capacity as Region 3 chair of the Psychiatry Student Interest Group Network (PsychSIGN). This included a collaboration with the non-profit organization Emotions Matter to hold a panel discussion of medical students with people with lived experience of BPD.

Investigating efficacy of Internet-mediated interventions for psychiatric disease

A theme that has pervaded several research experiences from my undergraduate to medical school years has been that of Internet-mediated interventions. In the Masland lab at Pomona College, I conducted a meta-analysis on Internet-mediated interventions for perfectionism as a preventive intervention to address high demand for mental health services on college campuses, and found that they demonstrated efficacy (Iliakis & Masland, 2021). In the Choi-Kain lab at McLean Hospital, I meta-analyzed RCTs of smartphone interventions for borderline personality disorder symptoms, finding no evidence of efficacy (Ilagan, Iliakis, et al., 2020). At Penn, I assisted with a randomized controlled trial of a single-session Internet-mediated intervention for depression and anxiety in Greek adolescents, establishing feasibility and efficacy as well as sustained symptom improvement at 8-week follow-up (Zoupou, Wasil, Iliakis et al., 2022 poster, see below). The meta-analytic investigations have been published, and the RCT is in progress, although we presented pilot data at the 2022 Association for Behavior and Cognitive Therapies conference. These projects not only extended my knowledge of Internet-mediated interventions, but also provided a measure of their efficacy to inform systems-level implementation.

  1. Iliakis EA, Masland SR. Internet interventions for perfectionism: a meta-analysis and proposals for the college setting. J Am Coll Health 2021:1-6.
  2. Ilagan GS, Iliakis EA, Wilks CR, Vahia IV, Choi-Kain LW. Smartphone applications targeting borderline personality disorder symptoms: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Borderline Personal Disord Emot Dysregul 2020;7:12.
  3. Zoupou E, Wasil A, Iliakis EA, Vafea N, Bechraki A, Kypraiou E, Peppou L, Economou M, DeRubeis RJ. Adaptation of an online single-session intervention for Greek adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Association for Behavior and Cognitive Therapies (2022 November 17-20): New York, NY (Poster PS5-D83).

Investigations into neural basis of negative reinforcement and decision-making

At Penn, I became increasingly interested in the underlying neural circuit basis of neuropsychiatric disease-related behaviors. I completed a summer-autumn rotation with Dr. Marc Fuccillo in 2021, where I used the FosTRAP2 system to identify neural ensembles active during execution of a positive and negative reinforcement behavioral task in mice. We identified cortical regions with increased activity during negative reinforcement relative to positive reinforcement and have used these data to guide subsequent optogenetic manipulations. Following the completion of my clinical rotations, I returned to the Fuccillo lab in 2022 as a 3rd-year MD-PhD student. Here, I established a head-fixed joystick-based value-based decision-making task (Linares-Garcia, Iliakis et al., 2025) and collected preliminary constitutive silencing and fiber photometry data implicating somatostatin-positive low-threshold spiking interneurons in the dorsomedial striatum in value-based goal-directed behavior, which is perturbed in a range of neuropsychiatric diseases. I have received an NIMH F30 Pre-Doctoral Fellowship Award to complete this project. I have presented these findings at a talk at the Basal Ganglia Gordon Research Seminar in March 2024, at a talk at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in October 2024 and at a talk at the Inhibition Gordon Research Conference in July 2025. These projects have given me extensive experience in basic neuroscience laboratory techniques, rodent surgeries, genetic tools, electronics, coding, and data analysis, and have extended my skills in formulating questions and designing experiments independently.

  1. Linares-Garcia I*, Iliakis EA*, Juliani SE, Ramirez AN, Woolley J, Díaz-Hernández E, Fuccillo MV, Margolis DJ: An open-source joystick platform for investigating forelimb motor control, auditory-motor integration, and value-based decision-making in head-fixed mice. ENeuro 2025;20(4):ENEURO.0038-25.2025. *authors contributed equally