Portrait of Harman Brah, MD
Clinical AI · Clinical trials · Drug discovery

Harman Brah, MD

Psychiatrist and physician-scientist at UCLA and the West Los Angeles VA. I build and test clinical AI, work on psychedelic and schizophrenia trials, and run a computational drug discovery lab.

Open to  fractional CMO, clinical advisor and medical lead roles at health tech, medtech and life-science AI companies.
Email me LinkedIn CV (PDF)

What I bring

Clinical AI, built and evaluated

Built an LLM tool that drafts inpatient psychiatry discharge summaries at the VA. Published on how LLMs fail atypical patients (Journal of Medical Ethics).

Clinical trials

Investigator on VA trials of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, psilocin for treatment-resistant depression, and new-mechanism drugs for schizophrenia.

Real-world data and drug safety

FAERS pharmacovigilance on GLP-1 drugs with antipsychotics, EHR analysis on MIMIC-IV, and a genetic-testing meta-analysis in Biological Psychiatry.

ML for drug discovery

Transformer models for fragment linking and AlphaFold-based design of bispecific T-cell engagers. Earlier work on ML355, now in development as CAD-1005.

Experience

2024 – now

Psychiatry Resident Physician, Research Track

UCLA Semel Institute · West Los Angeles VA Medical Center

Inpatient, emergency, consult-liaison and addiction psychiatry. Built an internal LLM tool that drafts inpatient discharge summaries for residents.

2026 – now

Resident Research Investigator

VA MIRECC · mentor Stephen R. Marder, MD

Trials of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, psilocin for treatment-resistant depression, and novel-mechanism schizophrenia therapeutics.

2018 – now

Principal Investigator, Brah Lab

Aspiring Scholars Directed Research Program

Computational drug discovery and clinical informatics. 400+ student researchers mentored. Lab work has been presented at IEEE MIT URTC, NCUR and SCCUR.

2023 – 2024

Research Fellow

Rady Children's Hospital & UC San Diego Psychiatry

Led a multi-institutional meta-analysis of genetic testing yield in schizophrenia.

2020 – 2022

Graduate Research Fellow

UC San Diego Pharmacology · Sunahara Lab

β2-adrenergic receptor allosteric pharmacology.

2015 – 2018

Research Assistant

UC San Francisco Pharmaceutical Chemistry · England & Jacobson Labs

Optimized the 12-LOX inhibitor ML355, now CAD-1005, which completed Phase 2 and is headed to Phase 3.

Selected publications

  1. 2025

    The problem of atypicality in LLM-powered psychiatry

    Journal of Medical Ethics
  2. 2026

    Clinical genetic testing in schizophrenia: a systematic review and meta-analysis

    Biological Psychiatry 99(7):541–549Lead author
  3. 2026

    Transformer-based molecular fragment prediction using SMILES and DeepSMILES representations in a fragment-based drug discovery pipeline

    Journal of CheminformaticsCo-senior author
  4. 2026

    Computational design of a TCR-based bispecific engager targeting cancerous KRAS G12V mutations

    ACS OmegaSenior author
  5. 2021

    Docking and mutagenesis studies lead to improved inhibitor development of ML355 for human platelet 12-lipoxygenase

    Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry 46:116347
  6. 2021

    Analogs of the dopamine metabolite 5,6-dihydroxyindole bind directly to and activate the nuclear receptor Nurr1

    ACS Chemical Biology 16(7):1232–1241

Under review and in progress

  1. 2026

    Antipsychotic and benzodiazepine use in Cluster B admissions: a retrospective analysis of MIMIC-IV

    Journal of Psychiatric Research, under reviewCorresponding author
  2. 2026

    GLP-1 receptor agonists with antipsychotics in severe mental illness: a FAERS pharmacovigilance study

    Poster, Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry 2026 · manuscript in preparationLead author
  3. 2026

    Probing the relationship between clozapine-induced myocarditis and HLA alleles

    Journal of Molecular Modeling, under reviewCorresponding author
  4. 2026

    Computational analysis of GLP-1RA–VEGFR2 binding mechanisms in wet AMD

    Manuscript in preparationSenior author
  5. 2025

    In silico design of blinatumomab: a conventional bispecific T cell engager for targeted immunotherapy

    ChemRxiv preprintSenior author

Talks

  1. 2025

    Diagnostic yield of clinical genetic testing in schizophrenia

    Society of Biological Psychiatry Annual Meeting
  2. 2024

    Navigating ethical frontiers in chatbot-assisted psychiatry

    Technology in Medicine Symposium, UC Irvine
  3. 2024

    LLM-powered psychiatry: from back to front

    Linde Center for Science, Society, and Policy, Caltech

Education and credentials

2020 – 2024

Doctor of Medicine

UC San Diego School of Medicine
2016 – 2020

BS Biochemistry, summa cum laude

Loyola Marymount University · Phi Beta Kappa
License
California Physician & Surgeon, active
DEA
Schedules II–V
Boards
USMLE Steps 1, 2 CK and 3
Languages
English, Punjabi, Hindi