Mark Richardson, MD, PhD
Dr. Richardson founded the Brain Modulation Lab at the University of Pittsburgh in 2011, with a mission to apply a systems neuroscience approach to improving surgical treatments for epilepsy, movement disorders, and psychiatric disease. At MGH since 2019, the lab's work is facilitated by collaborations with colleagues at MGH, MIT, Harvard Medical School, and Boston University. Unique contributions of the Brain Modulation Lab include the first studies describing simultaneous cortical and subcortical recordings during speech, with support from the BRAIN Initiative, the first study describing biomarkers of therapeutic responsive neurostimulation for epilepsy, and the first study describing a biomarker of OCD symptomatology from sensing-enabled DBS recordings. Dr. Richardson co-founded the MGH-MIT InBRAIN Collaboration in 2020.
Dr. Richardson's clinical expertise includes awake brain mapping during epilepsy and DBS surgery, robotic-assisted and real-time MRI guided stereotactic surgery, and comprehensive network surgery approaches to both adult and pediatric epilepsy. He obtained a B.A. in Environmental Sciences from the University of Virginia and completed the MD/PhD program at Virginia Commonwealth University. During neurosurgical training at UCSF, he authored the first paper describing the ClearPoint neuronavigational system. He was Director of Epilepsy and Movement Disorders Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) from 2011-2019, where he established an internationally-recognized clinical and research program. There, he was the first surgeon to employ bilateral centromedian RNS to treat idiopathic generalized epilepsy. Dr. Richardson is an active in several pioneering clinical trials of brain modulation, in the areas of both closed-loop brain stimulation and gene therapy. He was the national surgical PI for the pivotal trial of SetPoint VNS for rheumatoid arthritis.
