Mayron Piccolo, PhD, BCBA
About
Clinician, lecturer, and researcher — Cambridge, MA.
Born in Brazil, Dr. Mayron Piccolo is a Brazilian-American-Italian psychologist and Board Certified Behavior Analyst whose research, teaching, and clinical career are organized around a single question: how psychopathology can be understood, assessed, and treated more accurately across diverse populations. He pursues it through three connected arms.
Understanding asks how reward processes shape mental health — across eating and weight disorders (anorexia and bulimia nervosa, obesity, and binge eating), the altered reward circuitry of depression, and communal music-making as a social reward. Assessing asks whether our instruments carry the same meaning across languages and cultures, from the “several days” response option on the PHQ-9 to portion-size estimation errors and idioms of distress in trauma. Treating turns those findings into care and into interventions built to scale — and into direct clinical work with the communities that need them. Each arm includes digital implementation: telehealth psychotherapy with a multilingual immigrant caseload, fully remote experiments, and interventions designed to run without a clinician in the room.
He earned his PhD at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), followed by research training at McLean Hospital and clinical training at Cambridge Health Alliance (both Harvard Medical School). A clinician as well as a scientist, he provides multilingual psychotherapy (English, Portuguese, Spanish, and French) to immigrant communities at Cambridge Health Alliance and consults to schools through McLean Hospital. He teaches award-winning courses on reward, psychopathology, and the psychology of music at Harvard, and has taught at Columbia, NYU, and universities in Switzerland and Brazil.
13 peer-reviewed articles, plus 3 book chapters
$155K+ competitive research funding
4 languages in clinical practice
74 children and parents completed the music RCT
4,000+ reached by Psicologia no Sofá
5 universities taught at, across 3 countries
Massachusetts Licensure
- Licensed Psychologist
- Licensed Applied Behavior Analyst (LABA)