Bavani Rajah, MD

Bavani
Rajah
MD
Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
bavani.rajah@vumc.org

Dr. Bavani Rajah is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Dr. Rajah received her undergraduate education at the University of Akron and attended medical school at Northeast Ohio Medical University as part of an accelerated BS/MD program. She completed clinical training in adult psychiatry at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Illinois and served as chief resident during the 2020-2021 academic year.  Dr. Rajah pursued child and adolescent psychiatry training at Northwestern University/Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago. In 2023, she joined the faculty at Vanderbilt as an attending on the Child and Adolescent inpatient unit at Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital and outpatient care for children with neurodevelopmental conditions in the MEND Clinic.  Her clinical interests include anxiety disorders, family therapy, neurodevelopmental disorders and technology/social media in psychiatry. 

Ryan Darby, MD

Ryan
Darby
MD
Assistant Professor of Neurology

Dr. Darby is interested in patients with symptoms at the border zone between neurology and psychiatry. Both neurological and psychiatric patients can share similar symptoms, including delusions, hallucinations, and antisocial and criminal behavior. This suggests that these symptoms may share a common pathway across different diseases. However, these different diseases often have neuroimaging abnormalities in different locations, making it difficult to understand how the same symptom could develop.

To address this problem, Dr. Darby helped to develop a new neuroimaging approach to localize complex behaviors to brain networks, rather than specific brain locations. He first studied this in patients with focal brain lesions, showing that brain lesions in different locations causing the same syndrome were all functionally connected to the same brain network. Dr. Darby’s current work is focused on applying this method to neurodegenerative disorders in order to understand why brain atrophy in different locations can cause the same clinical syndrome. He is using this method in combination with behavioral testing to study criminal behavior in frontotemporal dementia patients and delusions/hallucinations in patients with Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, and Lewy Body Dementia. Dr. Darby has received numerous awards for his research, including the Stanley Cobb Award from the Boston Society for Neurology and Psychiatry, the Young Investigator Award from the American Neuropsychiatric Association, the S. Weir Mitchell Award for Outstanding Early Career Investigator from the American Academy of Neurology, and the Norman Geschwind Prize in Behavioral Neurology. His work is generously funded by the Sidney R. Baer, Jr Foundation, the Alzheimer's Association, the BrightFocus Foundation, and the Department of Defense.

For more information on Dr. Darby’s research, please visit his lab website.

Ryan Darby is an assistant professor of neurology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He currently sees patients as the director of the Frontotemporal Dementia Clinic in the Department of Neurology at VUMC.

He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University in psychology and neuroscience, and his medical degree from Vanderbilt University. He trained in neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital as part of the Partners Neurology/Harvard Medical School program. He then received the Sidney R. Baer, Jr. Research Fellowship in Clinical Neurosciences at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He simultaneously completed a clinical fellowship in behavioral neurology and neuropsychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, and McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Boston.

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