Alessandra Grillo, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Deployment Psychology. Dr. Grillo earned her doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and completed her pre-doctoral internship at the Boston VA Healthcare System where she provided brief and full-model evidence-based treatments for a wide range of mental and physical health concerns in primary care and outpatient clinics serving Veterans.

Dr. Grillo has extensive research experience at the National Center for PTSD across the Women’s Health Sciences Division and Behavioral Science Division, focusing on intimate partner violence, traumatic brain injury, intervention development, and epigenetic risk factors of PTSD. Across her work, Dr. Grillo has been interested in exploring how stress exposure gets “under the skin” to influence risk for internalizing psychopathology. Her research interests center on the interplay between stress exposure and key biological processes in shaping risk for PTSD and depression and identifying biological and psychological risk factors that confer heightened stress sensitivity.

At CDP, she is extending this line of work to examine sleep variability as a biological risk factor for suicide risk among active-duty military personnel with the goal of informing prevention and intervention strategies.