Neurotherapeutics Leadership

Merit Cudkowicz, MD, MSc

Chief of Neurology, Mass General, Director of the Sean M. Healey & AMG Center for ALS at Mass General, Julieanne Dorn Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School, Director of the Mass General Neurological Clinical Research Institute, Co-Founder and past Co-Chair of the Northeast ALS Consortium

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Maurizio Fava, MD

Maurizio Fava, MD, psychiatrist-in-chief and director of the Division of Clinical Research in the Mass General Research Institute. In 2007, he founded and is now Executive Director of the Mass General Psychiatry Clinical Trials Network and Institute (CTNI), the first academic CRO specialized in planning and coordination of multi-center clinical trials in psychiatry.

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Steven Arnold, MD

Steven Arnold, MD, director of the Interdisciplinary Brain Center a new collaboration of the Departments of Neurology. Psychiatry and the Martinos Center for Neuroimaging. Its mission is to facilitate the discovery, development, and implementation of promising therapeutics and associated diagnostics for individuals with complex brain disorders that affect cognition, behavior and emotion. Neurodegenerative diseases are major disease interests of the Interdisciplinary Brain Center.

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Susie Huang, MD

Dr. Huang specializes in translation of novel MRI techniques for investigating structure, function and pathology within the brain. Her doctoral training in physical chemistry and subsequent residency in radiology and postdoctoral training at MGH provided her with a strong foundation in biophysical modeling, basic and clinical neuroscience, and the design and evaluation of hardware, software and pulse sequences for pushing the limits of contrast and sensitivity in MRI.

Her current research centers on the development and translation of advanced diffusion MRI methods for probing tissue microstructure in the central nervous system. As part of the NIH Blueprint-funded Human Connectome Project, she contributed to the first publications showcasing the unprecedented sensitivity and resolution of axonal microstructure made possible by the 300 mT/m gradients on the MGH Connectome MRI scanner. She has since developed methods for mapping axon diameter and density across white matter tracts throughout the living human brain, which offer insight into white matter damage in disease processes such as multiple sclerosis, aging and Alzheimer’s disease. Based on the success of these efforts, she now serves as the lead Principal Investigator on a $14 million NIH BRAIN Initiative multi-institutional collaborative grant to develop the next-generation Connectome MRI scanner for multiscale imaging of the human brain.

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Vijaya Ramesh, PhD

Dr. Ramesh is a Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Neurologist at MGH. Her laboratory works on NF2 and TSC, employing disease-relevant human cellular models to discover pathways and mechanisms of pathophysiology and using the results to identify single and combination drug treatment, which could be translated into the clinic.

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Mark Richardson, MD, PhD

Dr. Richardson completed the MD-PhD program at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Medical College of Virginia and neurosurgical residency at the University of California, San Francisco. His clinical expertise includes both awake and asleep DBS for movement disorders, psychiatric indications, and epilepsy, awake brain mapping, robotic-assisted surgery for both stereo-EEG and DBS implantation, and Responsive Neurostimulation for epilepsy. Prior to joining Mass General, Dr. Richardson was Director of the Epilepsy and Movement Disorders Surgery Program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. There, he established one of the world's leading intraoperative-MRI functional neurosurgery programs, encompassing DBS for movement disorders, gene therapy clinical trials for Parkinson’s disease, and laser thermal ablation for epilepsy, work which now continues at Mass General.

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Ana-Maria Vranceaneu, PhD

Dr. Ana-Maria Vranceanu is a clinical health psychologist, Associate Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School, and Founding Director of the Integrated Brain Health Clinical and Research Program (IBHCRP). She is an expert in behavioral intervention development and testing as well as in-person and live video mind-body and lifestyle modification programs.