Allen R. Braun, MD
Senior Scientist, Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress,
Uniformed Services University
Dr. Allen Braun is a Senior Scientist at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress and the Uniformed Services University. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature at Washington University in St. Louis in 1968 and did graduate work in Neuroendocrinology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison prior to attending Rush Medical College, where he received an MD in 1980. Following an internship in Internal Medicine, Dr. Braun completed a residency in Neurology at the Department of Neurological Sciences at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. He did postdoctoral work in Neuropharmacology and Neuroimaging at the NIH (NINDS) and completed a second residency in Nuclear Medicine at the NIH Clinical Center (Department of Nuclear Medicine). Dr. Braun is board certified in Neurology (ABPN) and Nuclear Medicine (ABNM).
Following his postdoctoral training, Dr. Braun remained at the NIH and joined the intramural faculty at the NIMH and NIDCD, where he received tenure in 2003. As a PI, Dr. Braun directed a laboratory largely devoted to clinical and preclinical neuroimaging. In addition to his research activities at the NIH, Dr. Braun served on the NIH IRB, the Animal Care and Use Committee, the Imaging Probe Development Core and as intramural consultant on several extramural study sections. He retired from the NIH in 2016 and joined the Behavioral Biology Branch at WRAIR as a fellow in the ORISE knowledge preservation program. At WRAIR, Dr. Braun was involved in the development of projects designed to characterize the electrophysiological and cognitive effects of novel hypnotic agents and use neuroimaging methods to identify the CNS effects of chronic sleep restriction.
Dr. Braun’s research agenda has encompassed basic and clinical investigations using a combination of neuroimaging modalities - hemodynamic methods (PET and fMRI) complemented by electrophysiological (EEG/ERP and magnetoencephalography) and PET radiochemical tracer techniques - to study a variety of neurological processes including sleep and mechanisms that regulate arousal during the sleep-wake cycle, as well as motor control, language, creativity, and other complex behaviors. The goal has been to understand how these processes are instantiated in the brain, and how they are altered in neurological and psychiatric illnesses such as stroke, aphasia, traumatic brain injury, and extrapyramidal disease. The overarching goal of his work has been to develop imaging methods that will serve as outcome measures to investigate and monitor the efficacy of therapeutic interventions.
Dr. Braun has published over 140 peer-reviewed publications, in journals such as Science, Nature Neuroscience, PNAS, PLOS One, Brain and Cerebral Cortex, which have received over 14,000 citations. He is a member of the American Academy of Neurology, Society for Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience Society and the Society for the Neurobiology of Language and has served as associate editor of Human Brain Mapping and on the editorial board of a number of additional publications.
Dr. Braun has an avid interest in literature, jazz and – perhaps at odds with his training in neurology – boxing. He has a daughter, a musician who lives and works in New Orleans and is an amateur musician himself, currently attempting to master the tenor saxophone.