Dr. Pushpal Desarkar is a Clinician Scientist with the Azrieli Adult Neurodevelopmental Centre, and the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute at CAMH. Dr. Desarkar is also the Medical Head of the Adult Neurodevelopmental Services at CAMH. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, and a graduate faculty at the Institute of Medical Sciences, both at the University of Toronto.
Areas of Research
As a Clinician Scientist, Dr. Desarkar's research has two overarching goals: 1) obtaining new knowledge related to neurophysiological underpinnings in neuropsychiatric disorders, especially autism spectrum disorder (ASD), across the lifespan; 2) developing novel therapeutic interventions for these conditions. Using innovative brain stimulation techniques, including transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and the combination of TMS and EEG (TMS-EEG), he is investigating evidence for aberrant neuroplasticity in the brains of individuals with ASD. He is also using a novel brain stimulation method to study if the aberrant neuroplasticity can be "reversed." If aberrant neuroplasticity is found to underlie ASD, modifying it could pave the way for developing robust treatments for this condition, which does not have any satisfactory medical treatment to date.
Publications
View Dr. Desarkar's publications on Google Scholar and PubMed.