John Gabrieli is a

neuroscientist A neuroscientist (or neurobiologist) is a scientist who has specialised knowledge in neuroscience, a branch of biology that deals with the physiology, biochemistry, psychology, anatomy and molecular biology of neurons, Biological neural network, n ...

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...

, and an Investigator at the

McGovern Institute for Brain Research The McGovern Institute for Brain Research is a research institute within MIT. Its mission is to understand how the brain works and to discover new ways to prevent or treat brain disorders. The institute was founded in 2000 by Patrick McGovern ...

. He is the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, a faculty member in the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and director of the Athinoula A. Martinos Imaging Center, part of the McGovern Institute. Gabrieli is an expert on the brain mechanisms of human cognition, including memory, thought and emotion. His work includes

neuroimaging Neuroimaging is the use of quantitative (computational) techniques to study the structure and function of the central nervous system, developed as an objective way of scientifically studying the healthy human brain in a non-invasive manner. Incre ...

studies on healthy adults and children as well as clinical patients with many different brain disorders, including

schizophrenia Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by continuous or relapsing episodes of psychosis. Major symptoms include hallucinations (typically hearing voices), delusions, and disorganized thinking. Other symptoms include social withdra ...

, depression,

Alzheimer's disease Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegeneration, neurodegenerative disease that usually starts slowly and progressively worsens. It is the cause of 60–70% of cases of dementia. The most common early symptom is difficulty in short-term me ...

, autism and dyslexia. As a graduate student with

Suzanne Corkin Suzanne Corkin (May 18, 1937 – May 24, 2016) was an American professor of neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. She was a leading scholar in neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience. She is best known for he ...

at MIT he carried out research with the famous HM, who was a globally amnesic patient as a result of epileptic surgery. Gabrieli was able to show the importance of the

parahippocampal cortex The parahippocampal gyrus (or hippocampal gyrus') is a grey matter cortical region of the brain that surrounds the hippocampus and is part of the limbic system. The region plays an important role in memory encoding and retrieval. It has been inv ...

in the formation of memories. In collaboration with Christopher deCharms and colleagues he was the first to demonstrate that human subjects could learn to control their own brain activity using real-time feedback from

functional MRI Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI (fMRI) measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. This technique relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled. When an area o ...

. One of his major current interests is dyslexia, in particular the use of brain imaging to identify children who are at risk for reading difficulties and to understand how reading instruction affects the brain. In 2008 Gabrieli was elected as a fellow of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respons ...

, which cited his "penetrating analyses of the nature of human memory, its neural substrates, its development, and its problems."

Notes

References

External links

McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT

McGovern Institute profile of John Gabrieli

Gabrieli lab

Athinoula A Martinos Imaging Center at MIT
Living people Year of birth missing (living people) American cognitive neuroscientists Memory researchers Fellows of the Society of Experimental Psychologists Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty Fellows of the Association for Psychological Science Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Yale University alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni Neuroimaging researchers Dyslexia researchers {{US-med-bio-stub