Vincent Clark

Dr. Vincent P. Clark received his PhD in Neuroscience from UCSD. He completed his postdoc at NIMH in the National Institutes of Health, and is currently Director of the Psychology Clinical Neuroscience Center (http://pcnc.unm.edu) and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of New Mexico, and Professor of Translational Neuroscience at the Mind Research Network and Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute (http://mrn.org). He utilizes neuroimaging and neuromodulation or brain stimulation, including electrical (tDCS/tACS/tES), magnetic (TMS), light (tPBM), ultrasonic (tUS and fTUS) and physical pressure based techniques to examine hypotheses regarding the mechanisms of attention, perception and memory in healthy people and how these processes are altered in patients with neuropsychiatric illnesses. His current research interests include three major areas: 1) The application of neuroimaging for the study and diagnosis of neurological and psychiatric disorders. 2) The development of novel treatment modalities for these disorders. 3) The development of neuromodulation techniques for cognitive enhancement in healthy volunteers. He developed a novel tDCS-based neuromodulation method that improves learning and performance from between two (Clark et al. 2012) to four times (Gibson et al. 2020) greater than sham control, with an effect size of up to 1.7, and he and his collaborators have developed new methods to increase memory consolidation during sleep using closed-loop tACS (Ketz et al. 2018) and combining mindfulness with neuromodulation to increase working memory (Hunter et al. 2018), among other applications, and has also found evidence that imaging ultrasound protocols increase brain excitability (Gibson et al. 2018). He has discovered an MRI-based biomarker for relapse in stimulant misuse disorder with greater than 80% accuracy (Clark et al. 2014) among other findings.

February 2021