Marek Kubicki, MD, PhD

Marek is Radiologist who holds an MD and PhD from the Medical University of Lodz, Poland. He has his primary appointment with the Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard medical School, where he is an Associate Director of Psychiatry neuroimaging Laboratory. His secondary appointments are with the Departments of Radiology at BWH, and the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. For the last 15 years, Marek has been using neuroimaging as a tool to study neuropsychiatric diseases, including schizophrenia. He has been involved in studies that use Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI), Magnetization Transfer Imaging (MTI), fMRI, and other imaging methods, and he has been on the forefront of developing non-standard measures and methods that will help us to understand better the neurobiology of brain diseases. Throughout his career he has been awarded several prestigious awards, including an NIH Young Investigator Travel Award (2003), two consecutive NARSAD Young Investigator Awards (2001-2003 and 2003-2005), an NIMH R03 grant (2003-2005), a Brigham and Women’s Hospital Translational Neuroscience Project Grant, a Harvard Milton Award (2006-2008), and he has been site PI on an NIH U54 center grant (2006-2009). He is on the editorial boards of Schizophrenia Research, Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, and Brain Imaging and Behavior. He is a frequent reviewer for NIH grant applications where he has been an ad hoc reviewer on ITVA NIMH committee. Currently, he is PI of two NIH funded grants: R01 AG04252 “Neural substrates of diffusion imaging in cognitively aging rhesus monkeys”, and R01 MH102377 “Diffusion Imaging Biomarkers for Risk, Onset & Outcome in Schizophrenia”.  

The goal of his research program is to apply new imaging techniques to the study of schizophrenia and other related disorders (such as SPD and VCFS), in order to determine and to localize further functional and structural brain abnormalities in this disorder, which likely underlie the symptoms and disordered behavior observed in these patients. Over the past fourteen years, he has been involved in trying to define and to localize abnormalities in the brain of schizophrenics through the use of Structural MRI, Functional MRI, Diffusion Tensor Imaging and Magnetization Transfer Imaging. His most recent research focuses on attempts to understand the nature of functional and anatomical connectivity abnormalities in schizophrenia, their relationship and impact on cognition and clinical symptomatology.