I am a clinical radiologist and neuroscientist by training. I have devoted my research career to understand mechanisms, nature and time-course of white matter pathology in schizophrenia. I am an Associate Professor in Departments of Radiology and Psychiatry at Brigham and Women?s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. I also serve as Associate Director of Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory, Department of Psychiatry at BWH, and as a co-Director of Center for Morphometric Analysis, Department of Psychiatry, and Massachusetts General Hospital, where I have a secondary appointment as research scientist. I have been conducting an NIH sponsored research since 2003, when I received my first R03 award. I am currently PI on an NIMH R01 award, focusing on Development of New Neuroimaging Biomarkers of Risk, Onset and Outcome of Schizophrenia. I am also a PI on NIA funded R01 on understanding mechanisms of brain development, maturation and aging through a set of neuroimaging tools and their validation in rhesus monkeys. Those two grants together have the potential of delivering validated neuroimaging biomarkers, which could be used to diagnose and monitor neurobiological changes due to myelin loss and neuroinflammation in schizophrenia, aging, and a whole list of other neuropsychiatric diseases where those changes are involved. Besides my research, I am also involved in mentoring Harvard, MIT and BU undergraduate and graduate thesis students, postdoctoral fellows (including T32 and K23 awardees), foreign fellows, and summer students. I am also involved in administrative work, as head of two large laboratories, at BWH and at MGH, and various local and regional committees. Finally, I am getting involved in nonclinical and non-POR research (through my ongoing and pending animal projects), and that takes away from both my mentoring and my POR research. The K24 would protect time and help me to focus on most important for my career development- mentoring (30%), further training and new POR (20%), while devoting remaining 50% to ongoing neuroimaging research in biomarkers of white matter changes in aging and schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia affects 1% of the population, yet, its neurobiology, as well as longitudinal natural course are not known. K24 will help support mentoring and training of both the PI and the talented junior clinical scientists in translational research aimed at understanding biological mechanisms of brain pathology affecting connectivity in schizophrenia.
