Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Dr. Richardson is a neurosurgeon-neuroscientist and Director of Functional Neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also Visiting Associate Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. Dr. Richardson received his BA from the University of Virginia, his MD-PhD from the Medical College of Virginia, and neurosurgical residency training at the University of California, San Francisco. From 2011-2019, Dr. Richardson was Director of the Epilepsy and Movement Disorders Surgery Program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where he established a leading program combining clinical innovation and basic and clinical neuroscience research. Dr. Richardson has pioneered the use of intraoperative-MRI in functional neurosurgery, including deep brain stimulation for movement disorders, laser thermal ablation for epilepsy, and experimental gene therapy for Parkinson's disease. His clinical expertise additionally includes awake brain mapping, robotic-assisted surgery for both stereo-EEG and DBS implantation, and Responsive Neurostimulation for epilepsy. Dr. Richardson also leads the Brain Modulation Lab, a human systems neuroscience lab studying motor control and cognition in patients undergoing intracranial recording and stimulation during DBS and epilepsy surgery. His lab has been funded by the NIH BRAIN Initiative, including the study of cortical-subcortical speech networks and the development of novel approaches to closed-loop brain modulation for Parkinson's disease. Unique contributions of the Brain Modulation Lab include the first characterization of simultaneous neural activity in the basal ganglia and cortex during speech, and the first discovery of electrophysiological biomarkers of therapeutic responsive neurostimulation in epilepsy.

• Neurosurgery
• Basal Ganglia
• Deep Brain Stimulation
• Epilepsy
• Speech
• ECoG
• Human Invasive Neuroscience
• Movement Disorders
• Psychiatric Neurosurgery