Neil Harris

Neil Harris is Professor In-Residence in the Department of Neurosurgery at UCLA and a member of the Brain Research Institute. With over 25 years of expertise in rodent CNS injury models, he specializes in advanced neuroimaging techniques including MRI, PET, fMRI, and DTI to assess brain structure and function post-injury. He directs the NEIL Lab, focusing on traumatic brain injury (TBI) pathophysiology and serves as scientific director of UCLA's 7T animal imaging core.

Education includes a B.Sc. in Biology/Neuroscience from the University of Portsmouth (1988) and a Ph.D. in Physiology from King’s College London (1991). His postdoctoral training spanned multimodal imaging at King’s College London, University of Florida, and University of Cambridge.

Research interests center on neurotrauma mechanisms, spanning:

• Functional connectomics of TBI using resting-state fMRI
• Epileptogenesis biomarkers post-TBI
• Neuroplasticity in developing brains after injury
• Metabolic dysregulation and neuroprotective interventions
• Multicenter harmonization of preclinical TBI data

His publications exhibit strong trends in neurotrauma biomarker discovery (35% of recent articles), epileptogenesis mechanisms (30%), and advanced neuroimaging analytics (25%). Collaborative works emphasize multicenter standardization through initiatives like TOP-NT and EpiBioS4Rx.

Research is supported by:

• National Institutes of Health
• UCLA Health Brain Injury Research Center
• Steve Tisch BrainSPORT Program

As director of the NEIL Lab, he oversees interdisciplinary investigations integrating neuroimaging, molecular analysis, and behavioral assessment to develop translational diagnostics and therapies.