Randy L. Buckner

Randy L. Buckner

Sosland Family Professor of Psychology and of Neuroscience
Randy L. Buckner

Randy Buckner received his BA in Psychology and his PhD in Neurosciences from Washington University in St. Louis. He is a member of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University, and the Director of the Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Division and faculty of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at the Massachusetts General Hospital / Harvard Medical School.

Weighing about three pounds, the human brain contains billion of neurons that are wired together in complex but highly structured networks. Randy Buckner’s laboratory explores the organization and function of large-scale human brain networks that contribute to high-level cognition. Using multiple behavioral, neuroimaging and computational approaches we characterize brain networks and how variation gives rise to differences in network organization and behavior, including dysfunction in neuropsychiatric illness. For example, in a series of recent studies we comprehensively characterized the organization of the cortex, striatum, and cerebellum with a particular focus on brain association networks important to memory and cognitive control. Using the understanding of normal organization as a foundation, we also explore disturbances in network organization in a range of neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative illnesses. Current projects seek to determine whether dysfunction can be detected prior to clinical symptoms in individuals at risk for illness. Recently our work has expanded to explore the detailed organization of individual brains and how that organization differs across people and changes over time. For these investigations we use approaches tailored to extract idiosyncratic details of individual brain anatomy as well as approaches to continuous behavioral monitoring via digital phenotyping on smartphones and wearables. This push toward the individual is critical for clinical translation as well as a number of open questions about how transient brain states influence behavior in the real world.

Contact Information

Northwest Laboratory 280.06
52 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
p: 617 384 8230

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