Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli is the Tommy Fuss Endowed Chair in Precision Psychiatry, the Associate Director of the Center for Precision Psychiatry (CCP), the Director of Research for the Center for Comprehensive Healing (CCH), the Director of the EPIC Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital and a member of Harvard Medical School Faculty.  Dr. Whitfield-Gabrieli received her BS in Biophysics/Physics and then pursued graduate work in mathematics (PhD/ABD) and in psychology/neuroscience (PhD) at UC Berkeley. She has held research faculty positions at Stanford University and MIT and served as a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and founding director of the Northeastern University Biomedical Imaging Center (NUBIC).

Dr. Whitfield-Gabrieli’s primary mission is to understand the brain basis of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders and to promote translation of this knowledge into clinical practice. She employs multimodal neuroimaging techniques to investigate the neural underpinnings of typical and atypical development as well as the pathophysiology of psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety and ADHD. To this end, her team develops novel, open-source and widely-used neuroimaging analysis tools, which open new windows to understanding brain network organization and function in brain health and disease — and which, ultimately, pave the way for the innovation of biologically informed approaches to personalized treatments for mental health. Her ultimate mission is to discover biomarkers, derived from functional and anatomical brain networks, which may be utilized for (a) prediction of therapeutic response (b) early detection of mental illness and (c) precision network therapeutics (e.g., real-time fMRI neurofeedback) with the hope of improving currently available treatments. Dr. Whitfield-Gabrieli has been principal investigator on multiple large-scale, multi-site NIH-funded grants aimed at clinical translation of her research to create better lives for those suffering from or at-risk for developing serious mental illness, including five currently funded domestic and international clinical trials.

Dr. Whitfield-Gabrieli has shared her work internationally with invited keynote/plenary presentations at the major neuroimaging, psychiatry and neurofeedback conferences (e.g., Organization of Human Brain Mapping (OHBM), Society for Biological Psychiatry (SOBP), Real-time Functional Imaging and Neurofeedback (rtFIN)).  She has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, including high-impact papers regarding the human default mode network and psychopathology (Whitfield-Gabrieli et al., PNAS, 2009, ~1700 citations) and methods papers for brain connectivity (Whitfield-Gabrieli & Nieto-Castanon, Brain Conn, 2012, ~ 5000 citations, Conn software, ~165,000 downloads). She has taught in numerous courses and seminars primarily at MGH but also elsewhere domestically and internationally to help students and researchers learn how to use these methods for a broad range of biomedical research.