Dr. Feusner is a senior scientist at the Brain Health Imaging Centre at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), where he is the director of the Brain, Body, and Perception Research Program. He is also a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto (UofT), Division of Neurosciences and Clinical Translation and a member of the UofT Institute of Medical Science and the Collaborative Program in Neuroscience.
Dr. Feusner obtained a B.Sc. in Biochemistry and Cell Biology from the University of California, San Diego, followed by an M.D. and completion of a psychiatry residency at the University of California, Los Angeles. He then completed a psychopharmacology fellowship and an NIMH T32 neuroimaging research fellowship.
Dr. Feusner was on faculty at UCLA from 2006 to 2021, where he was the director of the UCLA Adult OCD Program. His clinical areas of specialty are body dysmorphic disorder, OCD, eating disorders, and anxiety disorders. Dr. Feusner teaches cognitive-behavioural therapy and pharmacotherapy to psychiatry residents and provides research supervision and mentorship to junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows, Ph.D. students, master's students, medical students, and undergraduates. The NIH, the International OCD Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and the Klarman Foundation have funded his research.
Areas of Research
Dr. Feusner's clinical neuroscience research studies the brain basis of perception, emotion, and reward across conditions involving body image and obsessions and compulsions, using functional and structural neuroimaging, psychophysical testing, and neuromodulation. The mission of his research is to advance the understanding of the brain, behaviour, and individuals' experiences, driving the development of innovative and effective treatments for those with mental illness.
His seminal research includes the first fMRI, EEG, and TMS studies in body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), and the first studies to directly compare the neurobiology of BDD to anorexia nervosa. His pioneering functional brain imaging studies in BDD, later extended to anorexia nervosa, discovered that distorted perception of appearance is related to abnormal visual processing. This influenced changes in the classification of BDD in the fifth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders. Current pre-translational research investigates visual perceptual modulation using behavioural and TMS approaches to improve body image distortions, reward learning in anorexia nervosa, and the development and use of a digital application (Somatomap) to assess body image.
Publications
View Dr. Feusner’s publications on MyNCBI and Google Scholar.