Joy Hirsch

director, fMRI Research Center, Columbia University

Presiding over the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Center, Joy Hirsch, professor of functional neuroradiology, has established and directs a research center focused on medical applications, education, and the study of brain, behavior, and therapy-induced cortical effects utilizing the developments in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Dr Hirsch has a joint appointment in the Department of Radiology and the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, and her laboratory includes a large number of graduate students and postdoctoral students from the graduate school. Dr Hirsch joined Columbia from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Weill College of Medicine at Cornell University where she founded the fMRI laboratory and pioneered the introduction of brain-mapping procedures for neurosurgical planning. Using fMRI, her laboratory made fundamental contributions to the understanding of sensation and perception, language and the cognitive processes, and brain regions that are modified by specific drugs. These initial studies were built upon research done by Dr Hirsch as a professor at Yale University School of Medicine, where she focused on the cortical mechanisms directly involved in human visual processing, serving as a foundation to connect the advantages of fMRI to ongoing and new research directions at Columbia University.