Gina Kuperberg

Gina R Kuperberg, MD PhD, is the Dennett Stibel Professor of Cognitive Science at Tufts University and a psychiatrist in the Dept. of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. She earned her MD at St. Bartholomew's Medical School, London, and her PhD in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Kings College, University of London. She completed an internship at St. Bartholomew's Hospital and a residency and fellowship in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital and Institute of Psychiatry, London. She came to the US in 1998 and completed research fellowships in neuroimaging and cognitive electrophysiology at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, and the NeuroCognition Lab at Tufts University.

Dr. Kuperberg's NeuroCognition Lab is located both at Tufts University and the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging (Mass. General Hospital). It focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of language, thought and meaning. We are interested in when, where and how the human brain builds up the meaning of sentences, discourse (whole stories) and visual images (movie-clips). To address these questions we use multimodal neuroimaging techniques: event-related potentials (ERPs) have excellent temporal resolution and can tell us when neurocognitive processes happen in the brain; functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has excellent spatial resolution and can tell us where neurocognitive processes occur in the human brain. In addition to studying normal brain function, we are also examining how the build-up of meaning is impaired in patients with schizophrenia and how such impairments are reflected by abnormal patterns of brain activity in such patients. Visit our lab website for more details.

Graduate Students: joining our lab as a graduate student will offer you a strong cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistic training, and will give you insights into the use of multimodal neuroimaging methods to address fundamental questions of how the brain builds up meaning. Depending on a student's interest,during his/her graduate career he/she may focus on developing and expanding ERP projects in healthy individuals, may apply their paradigms to learn how language processing goes awry in schizophrenia, and/or may complement their training in ERPs with training in fMRI at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. Visit our research website to learn more about how to join the lab as a graduate student and for the types of studies that are being carried out by current grad students.

Undergraduate Students: we welcome undergraduate involvement in our research. Visit our research website to learn more about joining our lab as a volunteer.