Ajay Satpute, Ph.D.

Ajay Satpute, PhD, is Research Staff and Investigator in the Department of Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and director of the Affect and Brain Science lab at Northeastern University. His research aims to understand the neural basis of social cognition and emotion using human functional magnetic resonsance imaging (fMRI) methods. A main focus of his work concerns subjectivity - or the fact that different people experience the same world in different ways. Current research questions include: Does fears of heights, spiders, and social situations share a core fear system, or are neural representations of fear highly distributed and situation dependent? How does language and culture inform individual differences in how the brain represents emotions? Another focus of his work is aimed at understanding the neural basis of social cognition using predictive processing models. His lab specializes in developing computational methods to understand complex individual differences in mind-brain-behavior relationships.