Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Justin Baker, M.D., Ph.D., is a clinician-scientist in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder Program at McLean Hospital, where he directs the Laboratory for Functional Neuroimaging and Bioinformatics. His research uses a combination of neuroimaging, genetics, and behavioral phenotyping strategies to understand the systems-level neurobiology of human brain networks in healthy and diseased populations, with a focus on psychotic disorders. Dr. Baker obtained his undergraduate degree from Brown University, and his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied the oculomotor networks of the macaque monkey using a cortical mapping strategy that bridged insights from single-unit electrophysiology and post-mortem histology to in vivo tract-tracing using manganese-enhanced MRI to awake-behaving fMRI and resting-state fMRI. During his residency in psychiatry with the MGH/McLean program, Dr. Baker completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Dost Öngür (McLean Hospital) and Randy Buckner (Harvard / MGH), spearheading the collection of a large structural and functional neuroimaging data set in a cross-diagnostic sample of patients with schizophrenia or psychotic bipolar disorder. His current work is focused on within-patient (i.e., longitudinal) changes in brain network architecture – both in psychosis and other related clinical phenotypes (e.g.,, ultra-high-risk and early psychosis and bipolar depression) – to gain basic neurobiological insights about the factors that influence illness trajectory and therapeutic response across a range of psychopathology.