Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation (CNBS)
Optimizing and applying noninvasive brain stimulation to health care and research

Faculty

Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD
Principal Investigator

I am the Director of the Center for Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Boston, MA, USA). I hold appointments as Adjunct Professor in Psychiatry and Neurobiology at Boston University, and in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Faculty of Arts and Science at Harvard University, and am also the Associate Director of the Harvard-Thorndike General Clinical Research Center.

I was born in Valencia (Spain) and attended Medical School and completed a Ph.D. in Neurophysiology at the University of Valencia (Spain) and the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg i. Br. (Germany). I received my Neurology training at the University of Minnesota where I also completed a fellowship in Clinical Neurophysiology. I spent four years at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (Bethesda, Maryland), and joined Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center after working in Spain for four years as Associate Professor of Physiology at the University of Valencia and Staff Scientist at the Institute Ramon y Cajal from the Spanish Research Council.

I am Board Certified in Neurology and Neurophysiology by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, member of multiple professional societies, and the recipient of several honors and awards, including the Ramon y Cajal Award in Neuroscience (Spain), the Norman Geschwind Prize in Behavioral Neurology from the American Academy of Neurology, the Daniel D. Federman Outstanding Clinical Educator Award from the Harvard Medical School, and the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany). Currently I serve as secretary of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping and on the medical advisory boards for Northstar Neuroscience, Novavision, and the Institut Guttmann (Barcelona).

I continue to be clinically active as a staff neurologist with an outpatient clinic at the Behavioral Neurology Unit, and inpatient service at the Department of Neurology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. I am the recipient of a K24 award from the NIH to support my mentoring of young investigators. I am a co-director of the mentoring program offered through the Center for Faculty Development at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and I chair the Center’s subcommittee for underrepresented minorities. I am the author of over 200 papers in refereed professional journals, over 100 review articles and book chapters, and 2 books.

Research Interests / Research Focus

My aim is to understand neural plasticity at system's level. I seek to identify rules that are invariant across neural systems and domains. I believe that plasticity is the normally ongoing state of the nervous system and that a coherent account of any neurocognitive theory and neural system has to contemplate plasticity as an integral property of the nervous system and the obligatory consequence of each sensory input, motor act, association, reward signal, action plan, or awareness. In this framework, notions such as psychological processes as distinct from organic-based functions or dysfunctions, or of "good" and "bad" plasticity cease to be informative. Plasticity is the reason for development and learning, the cause of disease, and a mechanism of functional recovery. The challenge is to learn enough about the mechanisms of plasticity in order to manipulate them, suppressing some changes and enhancing others, to gain a clinical benefit and behavioral advantage for a given individual.

In the laboratory we combine various brain imaging and neurophysiologic methodologies to establish a causal relationship and a precise chronometry between regional brain activation and behavior. PET or fMRI identify information about brain areas associated with behavior. TMS can transiently deactivate a region of the brain, thus creating a "virtual patient" and explore causal relations. EEG, MEG and ERPs can provide further chronometric information. Repetitive TMS and tDCS allow the non-invasive modulation of activity in a specified cortical target area and its functionally connected cortico-subcortical neural network. MRI and EEG can guide such applications of neuromodulation. Such non-invasive approaches can lead to clinically relevant therapeutic effects in neuropsychiatry and neurorehabilitation, and serve as proof-of-principle prior to more invasive neuromodulatory interventions.

Relevant Publications

To learn more about recent lines of work please refer to the following
review articles:


Pascual-Leone A.
The Brain that Plays Music and is Changed by It.
In, Zatorre R and Peretz I (ed) Music and the Brain. New York Academy of
Sciences (2001).

Pascual-Leone A., Hamilton R
The Metamodal Organization of the Brain
In, Casanova C. and Ptito M. (Eds): Vision: From neurons to cognition,
Progr. Brain Res. Vol 134: 427-445 (2001)

Pascual-Leone A, Amedi A, Fregni F, Merabet L
The plastic human brain cortex
Ann Rev Neurosci 28: 377-401 (2005)

Link to NIH Formatted CV

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