Dr. Feusner is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, Division of Neurosciences & Clinical Translation; Foreign Adjunct Professor at the Karolinska Institute; and Visiting Researcher at UCLA. He is a member of the U of T Institute of Medical Science and the Collaborative Program in Neuroscience.
Dr. Feusner obtained a B.S. in Biochemistry and Cell Biology from UC San Diego, followed by an MD and completion of psychiatry residency at UCLA. He then completed a psychopharmacology fellowship followed by a National Institute of Mental Health T32 psychobiology research fellowship where he received training in neuroimaging.
Dr. Feusner was previously a Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA, where he was on faculty from 2006-2021 and 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 has taught cognitive-behavioural therapy and pharmacotherapy to psychiatry residents and other mental health providers, and has provided research supervision and mentorship to junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows, Ph.D. students, master's students, undergraduates, and high school students. His research has been funded by the NIH, the International OCD Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and the Klarman Foundation.
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. He also studies gender identity and own body perception in individuals with gender dysphoria.
His research utilizes functional and structural neuroimaging, psychophysical testing, and neuromodulation. 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 classification of BDD in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders in 2013. Current pre-translational research investigates visual perceptual modulation using behavioural and TMS approaches to improve body image distortions, reward learning in anorexia nervosa, and novel digital application development (Somatomap) to assess body image.
Publications
View Dr. Feusner’s publications on MyNCBI and Google Scholar