McGovern Institute Speakers

Speakers

Robert Desimone, Director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research

Robert Desimone studies the brain mechanisms that allow us to focus our attention on a specific task while filtering out irrelevant distractions. Our brains are constantly bombarded with sensory information. The ability to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant distractions is a critical skill, one that is impaired in many brain disorders. By studying the visual system of humans and animals, Desimone has shown that when we attend to something specific, neurons in certain brain regions fire in unison -- like a chorus rising above the noise -- allowing the relevant information to be ‘heard’ more efficiently by other regions of the brain.

Robert Desimone is director of the McGovern Institute and the Doris and Don Berkey Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Prior to joining the McGovern Institute in 2004, he was director of the Intramural Research Program at the National Institutes of Mental Health, the largest mental health research center in the world. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of numerous awards, including the Troland Prize of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Golden Brain Award of the Minerva Foundation.
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John Gabrieli, Director of the Athinoula A. Martinos Imaging Center at the McGovern Institute

John Gabrieli's research goal is to understand the organization of memory, thought, and emotion in the human brain. By combining brain imaging with behavioral tests, he studies the neural basis of these abilities in human subjects. In collaboration with clinical colleagues, Gabrieli also seeks to understand the brain abormalities that underlie neurological and psychiatric disease. Gabrieli has collaborated with colleagues at McLean Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital to examine abnormal patterns of activity in the brains of psychiatric patients. In the future he plans to combine neuroimaging with genetic studies to understand how genes and environmental factors interact within the brain to produce psychiatric disease.

John Gabrieli is the director of the Athinoula A. Martinos Imaging Center at the McGovern Institute. He is an associate member of the Institute, with faculty appointments in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, where is holds the Grover Hermann Professorship. He also co-directs the MIT Clinical Research Center and is Associate Director of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, MGH/MIT, located at Massachusetts General Hospital. Prior joining MIT, he spent 14 years at Stanford University in the Department of Psychology and Neurosciences Program. Since 1990, he has served as Visiting Professor, Department of Neurological Sciences, Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Hospital and Rush Medical College. He received a Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 1987 and B.A. in English from Yale University in 1978.
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Ann Graybiel, Investigator for the McGovern Institute and National Medal of Science Recipient

Ann Graybiel studies the basal ganglia, forebrain structures that are profoundly important for normal brain function but are also implicated in Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and addiction. Graybiel's work is uncovering neural deficits related to these disorders, as well as the role the basal ganglia play in guiding normal behavior. Ann Graybiel '71 joined the MIT faculty in 1973 and in 1994 was named Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. In 2001, she was appointed Investigator at

the McGovern Institute and was named a recipient of the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest science and technology honor. In 2002, Graybiel was awarded the James R. Killian Faculty Achievement Award which recognizes extraordinary professional accomplishment by full-time members of the MIT faculty. In 2004, she received the Woman Leader of Parkinson’s Science award from the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation, and in 2006, she was named the Harold S. Diamond Professor by the National Parkinson Foundation in recognition of her contributions to the understanding and treatment of Parkinson’s Disease. In 2008, she was named Institute Professor, the highest academic award at MIT. Ann is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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