Alayar Kangarlu
Alayar Kangarlu is an associate professor in the psychiatry department at Columbia University. His research is on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and its application in medicine. While at Ohio State University in 1996, their team built an 8 Tesla MRI scanner. In the past 12 years in Columbia, Kangarlu and his team have been developing new imaging, spectroscopic, and functional techniques to help neuroscientists better understand the human brain. He is currently using MRI to map functional connectivity and brain chemistry to advance understanding of the etiology of neuropsychiatric diseases. He will use this knowledge to assess how the brain responds to drugs and other therapeutic techniques, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). He is dedicated to developing innovative uses of MRI in unraveling the inner working of the human brain to learn the mechanism of neuropsychiatric disorders and help with the discovery of new treatments.