Bruce M. Cohen, MD, PhD
Director, Program for Neuropsychiatric Research
- Robertson-Steele Professor of Psychiatry
Biography
Bruce M. Cohen, MD, PhD, leads a multidisciplinary research program on the causes of psychiatric disorders, with the goal of developing new, more effective, and better tolerated treatments. He and his colleagues employ pharmacologic, brain imaging, epidemiologic, genomic, and cell model approaches to study neuropsychiatric disorders. Collaborating investigators work at McLean and other sites, including the Broad Institute, Harvard University, and MIT. Dr. Cohen has directed clinical and laboratory research projects at McLean for over 48 years. He was a founding director of McLean’s clinical research center, and is president and psychiatrist in chief emeritus at McLean Hospital, having led McLean from 1997 through 2005.
Dr. Cohen was named Psychiatrist of the Year by the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Massachusetts in 2005 and 2010. He has over 400 peer reviewed published manuscripts and book chapters describing the results of his work.
The Program for Neuropsychiatric Research (PNPR) at McLean Hospital, founded in 2004 by Dr. Bruce Cohen, is a consortium of investigators and clinicians using laboratory, brain imaging, and clinical techniques to increase understanding of the causes of psychotic, mood, anxiety, and related psychiatric disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease.
The PNPR initiates and manages collaborative research on patients with psychiatric disorders and healthy control subjects, with techniques including clinical, preclinical, cell biology, physiologic, genomic, and brain imaging components. A hallmark of Dr. Cohen’s research is combining various modalities of study to find convergent evidence on the biological pathways underlying psychiatric disorders. Because psychiatric disorders have complex and interacting causes, this multimodal approach is more powerful than applying single technologies to studying psychiatric disorders.
Three PNPR core laboratories obtain skin or blood cells from participants in the studies, and these are reprogrammed and studied as brain cells, including neural and glial lines, as well as brain organoids, in culture. Collaborating investigators and laboratories obtain clinical, brain imaging, and genomic information on these participants.
Particular interests of Dr. Cohen’s group include abnormalities of bioenergetics and mitochondrial function in psychotic, mood, and neurodegenerative disorders and abnormalities of cell development and connectivity, especially in those with schizophrenias. Dr. Cohen and others have discovered consistent and convergent evidence that these mechanisms explain substantial portions of the risk for psychiatric disorders. The findings are guiding the pursuit of new targets for novel treatments of neuropsychiatric disorders.
With 50 years of experience in clinical, research, and administrative work, Dr. Cohen also publishes on improving psychiatric diagnoses and care.
- Sue Babb, MS, Research Coordinator, PNPR
- Claudia Lopes, PhD, Assistant Neuroscientist, Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory
- Donna L. McPhie, PhD, Director, Cellular Neuropsychiatry Laboratory, PNPR
- Dost Öngür, MD, PhD, Co-Director, PNPR
- Caitlin Ravichandran, PhD, Assistant Biostatistician
- Kai-Christian Sonntag, MD, PhD, Director, Laboratory for Translational Research on Neurodegeneration, PNPR
- Anne Carpenter, PhD, Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT
- Sangmi Chung, PhD, New York Medical College
- Virginie-Anne Chouinard, MD, McLean Hospital
- Fei Du, PhD, McLean Hospital
- Brent P. Forester, MD, MSc, Tufts Medicine
- Staci Gruber, PhD, McLean Hospital
- Rakesh Karmacharya, MD, PhD, McLean Hospital/Massachusetts General Hospital
- Kwang-Soo Kim, PhD, McLean Hospital
- Kathryn Eve Lewandowski, PhD, McLean Hospital
- Ann K. Shinn, MD, MPH, McLean Hospital
- Jordan Smoller, MD, ScD, Massachusetts General Hospital
McPhie DL, Nehme R, Ravichandran C, Babb SM, Ghosh S, Staskus A, Kalinowski A, Kaur R, Douvaras P, Du F, Ongur D, Fossati V, Eggan K, Cohen BM. Oligodendrocyte differentiation of induced pluripotent stem cells derived from subjects with schizophrenias implicate abnormalities in development. Translational Psychiatry. 2018;8(1):230.
Cohen BM, Öngür D, Babb SM. Alternative diagnostic models of the psychotic disorders: evidence-based choices. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics. 2021;90(6):373-385.
Cohen BM, Sonntag KC. Identifying the earliest-occurring clinically targetable precursors of late-onset Alzheimer’s disease. EBioMedicine. 2024;106:105238.
Books
Living With Someone Who’s Living With Bipolar Disorder: A Practical Guide for Family, Friends and Coworkers
by Chelsea Lowe and Bruce M. Cohen, MD, PhD
(Jossey-Bass/John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010)
Education & Training
- 1969 SB, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- 1975 MD, Case Western Reserve University, School of Medicine
- 1975 PhD in Molecular Genetics, Department of Biology, Case Western Reserve University
- 1975-1978 Residency in Psychiatry, McLean Hospital
- 1977-1978 Chief Resident, McLean Hospital
- 1977-1979 Research Fellow in Psychiatry, Mailman Research Center, McLean Hospital
- 1976 Medical License, Board of Registration in Medicine, Commonwealth of Massachusetts
- 1976 Diplomate, National Board of Medical Examiners
- 1979 Psychiatry, American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology
