Apkar Vania Apkarian PhD

Apkar Vania Apkarian, PhD, is a professor of physiology, anesthesiology, and physical medicine and rehabilitation at Northwestern University, in the Feinberg School of Medicine. He has been a pioneer in the use of magnetic resonance spectroscopy to study the neurochemistry of the brain and the development of novel analytical approaches to studying consciousness, including the first demonstration of the brain's small-world network properties using fMRI.

In 2008, Dr. Apkarian proposed the theory that chronic pain is a form of emotional learning, which popularized the study of reward learning within the pain research field. Dr. Apkarian earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California and earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the State University of New York, Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. He is the brother of Vartkess A. Apkarian, a noted chemical physicist and laser spectroscopist at the University of California at Irvine.