Career
Buckner is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Harvard University. He is affiliated with the Center for Brain Science and is Director of the Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Division at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also faculty of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging.
Buckner received his Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, and Doctor of Philosophy from Washington University in Saint Louis in 1991, 1993, and 1995.
His Doctor of Philosophy thesis from the Program in Neuroscience focused on episodic memory retrieval under the guidance of Steven Petersen and Marcus Raichle. During his graduate training, he was also heavily influenced by Endel Tulving.
He trained as a post-doctoral fellow under Bruce Rosen at Massachusetts General Hospital where he worked with Anders Dale to develop event-related functional neuroimaging approaches to study cognition. He then returned to Washington University in Saint Louis as Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neurobiology in 1997.
Buckner has made a number of contributions including (1) description of the brain"s default network and its importance to Alzheimer"s disease, (2) characterization of human memory systems, (3) characterization of the organization of the human cerebellum, and (4) development of event-related functional Medical Research Institute. His recent research is centered around exploring human brain network organization and studying the genetic basis of individual differences in brain organization and neuropsychiatric disorders.
His research group helped propose the "tethering hypothesis" - the hypothesis that as the human brain increased in size, the newer areas of the cortex started to wire up with each other to form the "association cortices". Buckner has long been a proponent of open data sharing and development of neuroinformatics tools. With Daniel Marcus, his laboratory openly released the neuroinformatics data sharing platform XNAT in 2005.
Open data sharing projects include OASIS, FC1000, Human Connectome Project, and Generalized System of Preferences.