Bruce Wexler, MD

Professor Wexler graduated from Harvard College Magna Cum Laude with a major in Government and earned his MD at Albert Einstein of Medicine where he did research on neurotransmitter synthesis in cell cultures, studied for two years with Oliver Sacks, and studied psychiatry at Anna Freud’s clinic in Hampstead and neurology at the Institute of Neurology, Queen Square. He trained in psychiatry at Yale University and stayed as a member of the faculty. He argued for the importance of a neurosystems view of normal and abnormal brain function in a 1986 lead paper in the British Journal of Psychiatry, anticipated RDoC in a 1992 Biological Psychiatry paper advocating use of multiple physiological and cognitive measures to move past rather than hope to confirm psychiatry’s 100 year-old diagnostic system, and helped launch the field of digital neurotherapy with a series of intervention and fMRI studies beginning in 1997. This led to new, physiologically-based, technology-enabled, non-pharmacologic treatments for depression and ADHD, programs used in schools to enhance development of cognitive functions necessary for learning and compromised by poverty, and an NIH Director’s Award for paradigm-changing medical research. In 2006, Professor Wexler published Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology and Social Change (MIT press), a seminal text in cultural neuroscience. He has published over 135 peer-reviewed scientific papers and given invited lectures in North and South America, Europe and Asia.