Mark Cohen

Background

Mark Cohen was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Education

He then went to the Rockefeller University where he trained under Victor Wilson, Donald Pfaff and Susan Schwartz Giblin, receiving his Doctor of Philosophy in 1985 for his work on the pudendal nerve evoked response and its modulation by steroid hormones.

Career

He currently is a Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, Radiology, Psychology, Biomedical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Behavior and the Staglin Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. He is also a performing musician. He was raised in Stanford, California.

Cohen did his undergraduate studies at both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, where he received his bachelor"s degree in Human Biology.

In 1985 Cohen joined the Medical Research Institute Applications Group at Siemens Healthcare where he began a career in Medical Research Institute focused originally on education, and on technological improvements to reduce scan times. From 1988 to 1990 he directed the applications program at Advanced Nuclear magnetic resonance Systems in Woburn Massachusetts, a small startup dedicated to the creation of a practical echo planar imaging instrument.

He joined the faculty at Harvard/Massachusetts General Hospital in 1990 where he directed the "Hyperscan" fast imaging laboratory, and the Medical Research Institute education program until 1993. Since 1993 he has been at University of California, Los Angeles, where he developed with John Mazziotta the first dedicated functional Medical Research Institute imaging center.

While at Advanced Nuclear magnetic resonance Systems he partnered with Jack Belliveau and others to create the first functional images of the human brain by Medical Research Institute, using the ultra-fast instrument he and his collaborators created.

The latter work appeared in Science as cover art, using a now canonical image that Cohen created. As a consequence of his original training in neurophysiology, was interested developing a practical means of recording brain electrical signals Electroencephalogram simultaneously with fMRI. The method that he created was licensed to Electrical Geodesics, Incorporated. and sold as the GES300MR. With his student, Robin Goldman, he demonstrated strong functional associations between Medical Research Institute and Electroencephalogram signals. His interests and publications span a broad range of topics including schizophrenia, mental imagery, biophysics, time perception, drug addiction, epilepsy, cardiac imaging and others

His current work concentrates heavily on the development and application of machine learning methods to the decoding of brain activity and the physiology of cognition.

Source: Cohen is the Director of the University of California, Los Angeles/Semel NeuroImaging Training Program (NITP), a federally sponsored graduate and post-graduate educational program that seeks to bring advances in technology into the broad fields of neuroimaging. In addition to a traditional fellowship program, the NITP includes a two-week immersive workshop on advanced methods in functional Medical Research Institute. Archived videos of these programs are available on the web.

Mark Cohen has two children: Danielle Rosen and Max (Liana) Cohen.

Achievements

• Professor Cohen"s significant achievements in Medical Research Institute include the earliest clinical uses of echo-planar imaging, defining the safe boundaries of operation of high-end Medical Research Institute units.

Connections

colleagues:

Kenneth Kwong