Dr. Dawn F. Ionescu received a B.A. in the History & Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh, attended medical school at Penn State, and completed three years of a general psychiatry residency at The George Washington University. As a PGY-4 resident, she transferred to the NIMH's intramural training program. There, under the mentorship of Dr. Carlos Zarate in the Experimental Therapeutics and Pathophysiology Branch, she studied ketamine's antidepressant effects in patients with treatment resistant depression, with a focus on studying anxious depression. After she completed residency and a 1-year fellowship in clinical research at the NIMH, she took a faculty position at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, where she was awarded grant funding through a KL2/CMeRIT Award, a K23 award from the NIMH, and a NARSAD Young Investigator Award to study ketamine's antidepressant and antisuicidal effects. She also collaborated with the MIT Media Lab on the development of wearable, noninvasive sensors for the diagnosis and prognosis of depression. For her experience in clinical research, she was selected as a member, and later, Chair, of the FDA's Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee (PDAC). In 2017, she transitioned her career to industry to be a part of the esketamine development program at Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine (formally Janssen Pharmaceuticals), where she was part of the team that developed Spravato (esketamine) for patients with major depressive disorder with suicidal ideation. Based in La Jolla, CA, she is currently an Executive Medical Director in Neuroscience at Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine. She specifically works on a team that moves compounds from discovery to early clinical drug development, with a focus on phase 1 and 2 studies.