Suparna Choudhury is Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Culture, Mind & Brain Program at the Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University, where she works on the adolescent brain at the intersection of anthropology and cognitive neuroscience. Trained originally as a neuroscientist, Suparna has worked as a researcher in London, Paris, Berlin, and Montréal developing interdisciplinary skills to examine the implications of the new brain sciences for health and society. Her doctoral research in cognitive neuroscience at University College London investigated the development of the social brain during adolescence. During her postdoctoral research in transcultural psychiatry at McGill University, she founded the research program of Critical Neuroscience, which brings to bear perspectives of science studies and medical anthropology to examine how neuroscientists construct their objects of inquiry, and how research findings are transformed into popular knowledge and public policy. As a Research Leader at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin, she conducted research on the cultural contexts of the adolescent brain. Her current work in Montréal investigates how the dissemination of cognitive neuroscience may shape the ways in which researchers, clinicians, patients, and laypeople understand themselves, their mental health, and their illness experiences. Ongoing projects include analysis of neuroeducational interventions including mindfulness training for adolescents; use of neuroscience in juvenile law; subjective experiences of young people taking psychotropic medications; mental health and urbanicity; interpretations of data from brain science and epigenetics in the context of maternal mental health; and the politics of open science.
