Randy L. Buckner, Ph.D.

Randy Buckner is the Sosland Family professor of psychology and of neuroscience at Harvard University and is affiliated with the Harvard Center for Brain Science. He is also a professor at Harvard Medical School and the director for psychiatric neuroimaging research at Massachusetts General Hospital. He received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from Washington University, under the direction of Steven Petersen and Marcus Raichle. He trained with Bruce Rosen as a postdoctoral fellow and then became an instructor of radiology at Harvard Medical School, where he pioneered new functional MRI methods to study human memory. His work expanded to include studies of aging and Alzheimer’s disease with a focus on developing biomarkers that can disambiguate effects of normal aging from disease. This work led to a description of the brain’s default network and how it is targeted early in the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. He also developed widely used neuroinformatics tools to facilitate neuroimaging data management with an eye toward open data sharing, including the widely used XNAT data-sharing platform. He is presently a principal investigator on the National Institutes of Health Human Connectome Project targeting advanced aging. Buckner’s awards include the Wiley Young Investigator Award from the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, the Young Investigator Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, the 2007 Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences, and the 2010 Award for Medical Research in Alzheimer’s Disease from the MetLife Foundation. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Projects:

Centralized alignment database

Promoting functional brain maintenance – insights from successful agers