Instructor in Psychiatry, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Medical Director, Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder Research Clinic, McLean Hospital

Dr. Rakesh Karmacharya is currently an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Director of Stem Cell Research in the Center for Human Genetic Research (PNGU) at Massachusetts General Hospital, Medical Director of the Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder Research Clinic at McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA and a Physician-Scientist in the Chemical Biology Program at the Broad Institute (Harvard and MIT).

Rakesh grew up in Nepal and received his A.B. with honors in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard University (1993), an M.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University (1994), and an MD/PhD in Biophysics with honors from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (2002). He did his internship in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and his residency in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospital, serving as the Chief Resident of the Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder Program.

Rakesh and his team are applying chemical biology and stem cell approaches to study the neurobiology of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, using neuronal cells generated from patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). They are working on identifying disease signatures in the stem-cell derived neurons that will enable discovery of new molecular targets, in order to develop new therapeutic leads for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.