Michael Halassa, MD, PhD

Michael Halassa is a physician-scientist and associate professor of neuroscience and psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine. His work focuses on understanding how the brain controls thoughts and actions based on an internal model of the world. His PhD work at the University of Pennsylvania was focused on cellular neuroscience and his postdoctoral work at MIT was focused on systems neuroscience. Halassa also spends some of his time performing clinical work, focused on treatment of psychotic disorders. His ultimate goal is to come up with a circuit-based computational description of inference and belief updating that would explain how psychotic states arise and provide a clear path towards intervention.