Chara Malapani, MD

Dr. Malapani, MD, PhD, director since 2001 of the Temporal Cognition Laboratory at NYSPI, Division of Biopsychology, has twenty years experience in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience.

She was awarded a medical degree from The National University of Athens in 1983 and interned at the University Hospital of Neurosurgery in Paris, receiving a Specialty in Neurology in 1989. Served the French Institute of Health and Medical Research (1989-1996), studying neuropathology of movement disorders, neuropsychology and sterotactic neurosurgery. Awarded with The National Foundation for Medical Research and supported by College de France to conduct clinical research in patients with movement disorders.

She obtained in 1992 a Masters Degree in Neuroscience and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience in 1997. Worked as Consultant at Movement Disorders Clinic in Salpêtrière, lectured at University ParisVI and invited as a Visiting Scholar, University of Geneva. In 1993, she was Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Columbia, awarded a Human Frontier Science Project Organization grant to work with Dr. Gibbon, Chief of Biopsychology at NYSPI. Their research resulted in a National Institute of Health grant on which Dr. Malapani served as Principal Investigator.

In 1996, she was invited to join the faculty of Columbia University as Associate Research Scientist in Psychology. In 1999, she was appointed with a State Research Scientist position at NYSPI and a joint faculty appointment in Psychiatry-Neurology. Dr. Malapani began applied timing experiments, previously tested on animals, to humans suffering from neurodegenerative and mental diseases (Aging, Parkinson's, Huntington's, Schizophrenia) that yielded critical insights into the origin of timing and memory-related defects in these diseases and the role of the basal ganglia as a major underlying substrate of these defects.

She recently examined the effects of Deep Brain Stimulation in Parkinson's and she is currently involved with Basic Behavioral and Drug Research in engineered transgenic mice. Since 2010, Dr Malapani started a new direction of research studying Cognitive Control in Schizophrenia using fMRI, which is currently funded by NIMH.