Mark S. Cohen

Cohen served as the Chair of the Education Committee for the Society of Magnetic Resonance and the Chair of the Education Committee for the Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. He received both a Post-Doctoral Mentoring Award and an Excellence in (undergraduate) Mentoring Award from UCLA. He also was given the Education in Neuroimaging Award from the Organization for Human Brain Mapping. He mentored a total of 40 doctoral students at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, Caltech, and the University of Southern California, as well as seven post-doctoral fellows.

Cohen is active in international scientific relations, especially in Cuba, and his commentaries have been solicited and published in The Guardian, The New Yorker, BuzzFeed, and other news media.

Cohen's achievements in MRI include the earliest clinical uses of echo-planar imaging, defining the safe boundaries of operation of high-end MRI units. While at Advanced NMR Systems he partnered with Jack Belliveau and others at Harvard University to create the first functional images of the human brain by MRI ^[3] using the ultra-fast instrument he and his collaborators built. The latter work appeared in Science as cover art, using a now canonical image that Cohen designed. After moving to Harvard he went on to play a crucial role in the second major advancement in functional MRI - allowing observation of brain function without injected contrast agents - that resulted in Kenneth Kwong's seminal paper^[4] (in the same year that Ogawa and colleagues submitted their results subsequently published a year later in PNAS)^[5]), using the ultra-fast instrument he and his collaborators built. As a co-inventor of functional MRI, Cohen created an iconic cover for Science magazine that became a canonical standard for presentation of such data, and that has been reproduced widely.

With his original training in neurophysiology, Cohen was interested developing a practical means of recording brain electrical signals EEG simultaneously with fMRI. The method that he created was licensed to Electrical Geodesics, Inc. and sold as the GES300MR. With his student, Robin Goldman, he demonstrated strong functional associations between MRI and EEG signals.^[6]

Cohen has developed multiple experimental methods to enable studies of the brain's physical structure/mental structure interface. These methods include ultrafast imaging techniques, fMRI, simultaneous EEG and MRI, machine-learning methods for decoding brain images, and focused ultrasound brain stimulation. He has applied these tools to the investigation of mental imagery,^[7] time perception, racial/religious bias,^[8] the neurology of belief,^[9] and lie detection. He also has used MRI methods to better detect and understand major psychiatric and neurological disorders including schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, epilepsy, depression, dementia, bipolar disorder, addiction, ADHD, autism, and others.