Dr. Gaurav H. Patel, MD, PhD

Gaurav Patel, MD/PhD is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University and a Research Scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.  His research interest is in the neural systems underlying social cognition, and how they become dysfunctional in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia.  Dr. Patel received his MD and PhD at Washington University School of Medicine, where he used task and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake behaving macaques to map the circuits that control orienting of attention with Maurizio Corbetta and Larry Snyder.  During his psychiatry residency at Columbia University, he performed a study that compared human and monkey attention circuits with Vincent Ferrera. He then completed both a T32 research fellowship and a K23 Career Development Award under the mentorship of Daniel Javitt.  These projects used naturalistic stimuli, eye-tracking, and fMRI to measure behavioral and functional deficits during social …cognition in schizophrenia.  His current efforts are focused on extending these findings, by using advanced retinotopic mapping methods to examine the effects of these deficits on the dynamics of the cortical activity and by exploring whether these deficits exist in individuals at high risk for developing schizophrenia. The ultimate goal of these studies is to understand the primary deficits and compensatory mechanisms in each patient, leading in the future to individualized treatment strategies.  For his work, Dr. Patel has received a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award in 2005, a Leon Levy Neuroscience Fellowship in 2009, a fellowship from the American Psychiatric Foundation in 2013, a NARSAD Young Investigator Award in 2015, and a David Mahoney Neuroimaging Award from the Dana Foundation in 2017.