Bilal Bari, MD, PhD

Bilal Bari, MD, PhD

Psychiatry Resident; Aspiring Physician-Scientist

MGH, McLean Hospital

Harvard Medical School

Welcome

I am a psychiatry resident at MGH/McLean Hospital. I am passionate about understanding what makes us intelligent and how these processes go awry in mental illness. I am broadly interested in computational psychiatry, particularly at the interface of cognitive science and psychiatry. My current work focuses on how cognitive resource limitations may give rise to psychopathology. I hope to develop and apply resource-rational theories of cognition to better understand, diagnose, prognosticate, predict therapeutic response, and develop new treatments for mental illness.

I received my BS in Biomedical Engineering from Georgia Tech where I worked with Garrett Stanley. I completed my MD/PhD at Johns Hopkins and pursued a PhD with Jeremiah Cohen. I characterized the neural circuitry (particularly cortico-basal-ganglia circuits) underlying flexible decision making. I collaborated with Tricia Janak's lab to better characterize the role of basal ganglia circuits in motivated behavior and Charlie Bradberry’s lab to characterize reversal learning behavior in squirrel monkeys. I currently work with Sam Gershman on resource-bounded rationality.

Outside of my core research focus, I am interested in causal inference (particularly from observational data), statistical modeling, and medical decision making.

Interests
  • Computational Psychiatry
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Decision Making
  • Artificial Intelligence
Education
  • MD, 2021

    Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

  • PhD in Neuroscience, 2021

    Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

  • BS in Biomedical Engineering, 2011

    Georgia Institute of Technology

Preprints and Working Papers

(2024). Time and memory costs jointly determine a speed-accuracy trade-off and set-size effects. PsyArXiv.

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(2024). Computationally-informed insights into anhedonia and treatment by κ-opioid receptor antagonism. medRxiv.

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Publications

(2024). Resource-rational psychopathology. Behavioral Neuroscience.

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(2024). Cushing Disease Psychosis Identified as Postoperative Psychosis. Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry.

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(2023). Evaluating capacity: Appelbaum’s framework interpreted diagrammatically. Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry.

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(2023). Mild vitamin C deficiency is common in the inpatient psychiatric setting. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

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(2023). A Bayesian Reanalysis of a Trial of Psilocybin versus Escitalopram for Depression. Psychedelic Medicine.

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(2023). Mechanisms of adjustments to different types of uncertainty in the reward environment across mice and monkeys. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience.

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(2023). Undermatching is a consequence of policy compression. Journal of Neuroscience.

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(2022). Folie à Famille: An Atypical Presentation of Eczema in a Family. Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry.

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(2022). Serotonin neurons modulate learning rate through uncertainty. Current Biology.

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(2022). Reinforcement learning modeling reveals a reward-history-dependent strategy underlying reversal learning in squirrel monkeys. Behavioral Neuroscience.

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(2021). Entropy-based metrics for predicting choice behavior based on local response to reward. Nature Communications.

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(2021). Aversive stimuli bias corticothalamic responses to motivationally-significant cues. eLife.

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(2021). Subthreshold basis for reward-predictive persistent activity in mouse prefrontal cortex. Cell Reports.

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(2021). Locus coeruleus spiking differently correlates with S1 cortex activity and pupil diameter in a tactile detection task. eLife.

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(2021). Dynamic decision making and value computations in medial frontal cortex. International Review of Neurobiology.

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(2020). Subhanallah: A Cultural Connection. Academic Medicine.

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(2020). A quantitative reward prediction error signal in the ventral pallidum. Nature Neuroscience.

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(2019). Locus coeruleus-norepinephrine: basic functions and insights into Parkinson’s disease. Neural Regeneration Research.

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(2019). Stable representations of decision variables for flexible behavior. Neuron.

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(2019). Localization of the Locus Coeruleus in the Mouse Brain. JoVE.

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(2018). ATP7A and ATP7B copper transporters have distinctfunctions in the regulation of neuronaldopamine-β-hydroxylase. Journal of Biological Chemistry.

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(2013). Behavioral and electrophysiological effects of cortical microstimulation parameters. PLOS One.

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(2012). Detection of tactile inputs in the rat vibrissa pathway. Journal of Neurophysiology.

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