Laura Berner PhD

Laura Berner is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry in the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She is the Director of the Neuroscience of Eating and Associated Pathology Research Program, Director of Clinical Research Strategy at the Mount Sinai Center for Computational Psychiatry, and a principal investigator at the Mount Sinai Center of Excellence in Eating and Weight Disorders. She graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and minors in Neuroscience and French. She received her doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Drexel University, where her neuroimaging training was supported by an NIMH Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award (F31). She completed her clinical internship at the UC San Diego Eating Disorders Center for Treatment and Research and the VA San Diego Healthcare System. Her subsequent post-doctoral training in neuroimaging at UC San Diego was funded by an NIMH Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Individual National Research Service Award (F32), and junior faculty training in computational cognitive modeling at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai was funded by an NIMH Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Career Development Award (K23).

Dr. Berner’s research seeks to understand why people engage in extreme eating behaviors. Specifically, her work is focused on understanding the belief-updating, decision-making, learning, and sensing processes that govern self-regulatory control, and on comprehensively characterizing how these processes go awry in individuals with eating pathology. To this end, her research leverages a multi-level approach, integrating functional and anatomical brain imaging with computational modeling approaches, neurocognitive and neuroeconomic tasks, neuroendocrine assays, ecological momentary assessment (EMA), and laboratory-based symptom measures. Her overarching goals are to build new explanatory models of symptoms, identify predictors of outcome, and translate research findings to novel interventions and guidance for clinical decision-making. She is co-chair of the international ENIGMA Consortium’s Eating Disorders working group, and her work has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Brain and Behavior Foundation, the National Eating Disorders Association, the Hilda and Preston Davis Foundation, the American Psychological Association, and the Academy for Eating Disorders. Dr. Berner’s ongoing projects examine how changes in states (internal/motivational or external/environmental) may abnormally influence control-related learning and decision-making in bulimia nervosa. Understanding these mechanisms is critical for the development of novel interventions for eating pathology and co-occurring conditions characterized by altered impulse control (e.g., substance use).