Dr. Robert Barry joined the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering in January 2024 as Program Director of Magnetic Resonance Imaging. From 2016 to 2023, he was Director of the Brain & Spinal Cord Laboratory at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital. He was an Assistant Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and Affiliated Faculty within the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences & Technology and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Barry completed his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at the Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping at Western University in London, Canada, before pursuing postdoctoral studies at the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science in Nashville, Tennessee. He has 20+ years of experience in ultra-high field MRI and received a decade of continuous NIBIB funding to develop novel hardware and acquisition methodologies for non-invasive functional imaging of the human spinal cord at 7 Tesla.

In August 2014, Dr. Barry was the lead author on the first publication demonstrating the use of functional MRI to characterize bilateral resting state networks in the human spinal cord.