Alvaro Pascual-Leone

From Psy3242

Overview

Alvaro Pascual-Leone, M.D., Ph.D., is the Director of the Center for Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation and a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. He also holds numerous other positions including the status of Adjunct Professor both in Psychiatry and Neurobiology at Boston University and in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Faculty of Arts and Science at Harvard University, as well as the Associate Director of the Harvard-Thorndike General Clinical Research Center. He is Board-Certified in Neurology and Neurophysiology by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. One of Pascual-Leone's greatest areas of accomplishment and self-proclaimed interest is in the psychological phenomenon of plasticity, or the constant changing of the brain and nervous system.

Personal History

A native of Spain, Pascual-Leone was born and raised in Valencia, where he later studied at the University of Valencia and completed a Ph.D. in Neurophysiology. He also studied in Germany, at the Albert-Ludwigs University and then came to the United States where he completed a fellowship in Clinical Neurophysiology at the University of Minnesota. After going back to Spain and working for four years as the Associate Professor of Physiology at the University of Valencia, Pascual-Leone finally joined the team at Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC).

Today, Pascual-Leone remains clinically active at Harvard and BIDMC, with an outpatient clinic at the Behavioral Neurology Unit and an inpatient clinic at the Department of Neurology. He mentors young investigators in the field and is on the boards of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, Northstar Neuroscience, Novavision, and the Institut Guttmann in Barcelona, Spain. He has received numerous prestigious honors and awards in his field, including the Daniel D. Federman Outstanding Clinical Educator Award from Harvard Medical School, the Normand Geschwind Prize in Behavioral Neurology from the American Academy of Neurology, and the Ramon y Cajal Award in Neuroscience in his homeland of Spain. Pascual-Leone has been credited for over 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals, two books, and over 100 review articles and chapters.