Hirofumi Morishita is an associate professor of psychiatry, neuroscience and ophthalmology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He received his Ph.D. from Osaka University after a psychiatry residency at the National Center Hospital of Neurology and Psychiatry in Tokyo and medical school training at Kyushu University (M.D.). Before joining Mount Sinai, Morishita was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Takao Hensch laboratory at Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School.

Morishita’s research focuses on understanding the mechanisms of developmental critical periods for cortical maturation and the cortical circuits that establish perception and cognition that are relevant to neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. His laboratory takes an integrated approach, combining molecular, anatomical, imaging, electrophysiological and behavior methodologies using mouse models. His laboratory examines these questions in the visual system in mice, a premier model of critical period cortical plasticity, to discover novel molecular/circuit mechanisms, and to apply these mechanisms as tools to dissect more complicated critical periods for prefrontal cortex-dependent cognitive behaviors such as social and attentional behavior.

Morishita was awarded a NARSAD Young Investigator Award from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, a Knights Templar Eye Foundation Pediatric Ophthalmology Career-Starter Research Award, a Whitehall Foundation Award and a March of Dimes Basil O’Connor Award. He is currently funded by the National Institutes of Health and is an associate member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.