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Mission

The Center for Law, Brain & Behavior puts the most accurate and actionable neuroscience in the hands of judges, lawyers, policymakers and journalists—people who shape the standards and practices of our legal system and affect its impact on people’s lives. We work to make the legal system more effective and more just for all those affected by the law.

Dr. Justin T. Baker graduated magna cum laude with honors in neuroscience from Brown University, where he studied the neural correlates of motor control and cognition using functional magnetic resonance imaging.  He then attended Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, where he earned his medical degree and a Ph.D. in neuroscience.  During his graduate training, he studied the neural correlates of visuospatial memory and oculomotor behavior in non-human primates with Lawrence Snyder, MD, PhD, and semantic memory in humans with Randy Buckner, PhD.  This work included the development of techniques to perform functional brain imaging in awake and anesthetized monkeys that led to a first author paper in Cerebral Cortex and a cover article in Nature.

In 2007, he moved to Boston to join the Massachusetts General Hospital-McLean Hospital Residency, and completed an internship in internal medicine at Newton Wellesley Hospital.  He is a co-investigator on a large-scale effort to characterize neuroimaging correlates of genetic and clinical variables in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, in collaboration with Dost Öngür, MD, PhD, (McLean Hospital) and Randy Buckner, PhD (Harvard  Department of Psychology).

In 2007, he was awarded an APIRE/Janssen Resident Psychiatric Research Fellowship, and in 2009, he was selected to participate in the NIMH Outstanding Resident Award Program. Dr. Baker is Associate Director of CLBB; Associate Director of the Research Concentration Program in the MGH/McLean Adult Psychiatry Residency Program; an Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School; and a Research Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Brain Science.

His research interests include cerebral cortical organization in humans and non-human primates, behavioral and physiological markers of mental states, novel brain imaging approaches to neurological and psychiatric illness, genetics of psychiatric illness, evolutionary psychobiology, memory, attention, modulation of emotion, and cognitive control.  His fascination with the social implications of neuroscience is longstanding.

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