Bilal Bari, MD, PhD

Psychiatrist

McLean Hospital

Massachusetts General Hospital

Harvard Medical School

Welcome

I am a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital, where I split my time between patient care and research. Clinically, I am interested in expanding access to mental health care. Scientifically, I want to understand what makes us intelligent and how these processes go awry in mental illness. My current work focuses on how cognitive resource limitations may give rise to psychopathology.

I completed adult psychiatry residency at MGH/McLean Hospital, where I worked with Sam Gershman on resource-bounded rationality. I completed my MD/PhD at Johns Hopkins and pursued a PhD in Neuroscience with Jeremiah Cohen. I characterized the neural circuitry (particularly cortico-basal-ganglia circuits) underlying flexible decision making. I received my BS in Biomedical Engineering from Georgia Tech.

Interests

Computational Psychiatry
Decision Making
Cognitive Resource Limitations

Education

Psychiatry Residency, 2025
MGH/McLean Hospital
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

Bilal A Bari, Shuhan He, Thomas H McCoy, Samuel J Gershman (2025). Optimal use of limited cognitive resources produces bias and noise in medical decisions. (submitted).

Publications

Bilal A Bari, Andrew D Krystal, Diego A Pizzagalli, Samuel J Gershman (2025). Computationally-informed insights into anhedonia and treatment by κ-opioid receptor antagonism. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.

Shuze Liu, Samuel J Gershman, Bilal A Bari (2025). Quantifying the cost of context sensitivity in decision making. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Shuze Liu, Lucy Lai, Samuel J Gershman, Bilal A Bari (2025). Time and memory costs jointly determine a speed-accuracy trade-off and set-size effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Bilal A Bari, Samuel J Gershman (2025). The value of non-instrumental information in anxiety: insights from a resource-rational model of planning. Computational Psychiatry.

Bilal A Bari, Samuel J Gershman (2024). Resource-rational psychopathology. Behavioral Neuroscience.

Bilal A Bari, Paavani Reddy, Bryce A Wininger (2024). Cushing Disease Psychosis Identified as Postoperative Psychosis. Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry.

Bilal A Bari, Scott R Beach (2023). Evaluating capacity: Appelbaum’s framework interpreted diagrammatically. Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry.

Bilal A Bari, Ana Ivkovic, Bryce A Wininger (2023). Mild vitamin C deficiency is common in the inpatient psychiatric setting. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

Sandeep M Nayak, Bilal A Bari, David B Yaden, Meg J Spriggs, Fernando E Rosas, Joseph M Peill, Bruna Giribaldi, David Erritzoe, David J Nutt, Robin Carhart-Harris (2023). A Bayesian Reanalysis of a Trial of Psilocybin versus Escitalopram for Depression. Psychedelic Medicine.

Jae H Woo, Claudia G Aguirre, Bilal A Bari, Ken-Ichiro Tsutsui, Fabian Grabenhorst, Jeremiah Y Cohen, Wolfram Schultz, Alicia Izquierdo, Alireza Soltani (2023). Mechanisms of adjustments to different types of uncertainty in the reward environment across mice and monkeys. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience.

Bilal A Bari, Samuel J Gershman (2023). Undermatching is a consequence of policy compression. Journal of Neuroscience.

Fernando Espi Forcen, Bilal A Bari, Kwadwo Owusu-Boaitey (2022). Folie à Famille: An Atypical Presentation of Eczema in a Family. Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry.

Cooper D Grossman, Bilal A Bari, Jeremiah Y Cohen (2022). Serotonin neurons modulate learning rate through uncertainty. Current Biology.

Bilal A Bari, Megan J Moerke, Hank P Jedema, Devin P Effinger, Jeremiah Y Cohen, Charles W Bradberry (2022). Reinforcement learning modeling reveals a reward-history-dependent strategy underlying reversal learning in squirrel monkeys. Behavioral Neuroscience.

Ethan Trepka (co-first), Mehran Spitmaan (co-first), Bilal A Bari, Vincent D Costa, Jeremiah Y Cohen, Alireza Soltani (2021). Entropy-based metrics for predicting choice behavior based on local response to reward. Nature Communications.

Federica Lucantonio, Eunyoung Kim, Zhixiao Su, Anna J Chang, Bilal A Bari, Jeremiah Y Cohen (2021). Aversive stimuli bias corticothalamic responses to motivationally-significant cues. eLife.

Eunyoung Kim, Bilal A Bari, Jeremiah Y Cohen (2021). Subthreshold basis for reward-predictive persistent activity in mouse prefrontal cortex. Cell Reports.

Hongdian Yang, Bilal A Bari, Jeremiah Y Cohen, Daniel H O'Connor (2021). Locus coeruleus spiking differently correlates with S1 cortex activity and pupil diameter in a tactile detection task. eLife.

Bilal A Bari, Jeremiah Y Cohen (2021). Dynamic decision making and value computations in medial frontal cortex. International Review of Neurobiology.

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

David J Ottenheimer (co-first), Bilal A Bari (co-first), Elissa Sutlief, Kurt M Fraser, Tabitha H Kim, Jocelyn M Richard, Jeremiah Y Cohen, Patricia H Janak (2020). A quantitative reward prediction error signal in the ventral pallidum. Nature Neuroscience.

Bilal A. Bari (co-first), Varun Chokshi (co-first), Katharina Schmidt (co-first) (2019). Locus coeruleus-norepinephrine: basic functions and insights into Parkinson’s disease. Neural Regeneration Research.

Bilal A Bari, Cooper D Grossman, Emily E Lubin, Adithya E Rajagopalan, Jianna I Cressy, Jeremiah Y Cohen (2019). Stable representations of decision variables for flexible behavior. Neuron.

Katharina Schmidt, Bilal Bari, Martina Ralle, Clorissa Washington-Hughes, Abigael Muchenditsi, Evan Maxey, Svetlana Lutsenko (2019). Localization of the Locus Coeruleus in the Mouse Brain. JoVE.

Katharina Schmidt, Martina Ralle, Thomas Schaffer, Samuel Jayakanthan, Bilal Bari, Abigael Muchenditsi, Svetlana Lutsenko (2018). ATP7A and ATP7B copper transporters have distinctfunctions in the regulation of neuronaldopamine-β-hydroxylase. Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Bilal A. Bari, Douglas R. Ollerenshaw, Daniel C. Millard, Qi Wang, Garrett B. Stanley (2013). Behavioral and electrophysiological effects of cortical microstimulation parameters. PLOS One.

Douglas R. Ollerenshaw, Bilal A. Bari, Daniel C. Millard, Lauren E. Orr, Qi Wang, Garrett B. Stanley (2012). Detection of tactile inputs in the rat vibrissa pathway. Journal of Neurophysiology.