Martin Picard, PhD received his BSc Honours in neuroimmunology, and Ph.D. in mitochondrial biology of aging at McGill University. He then moved to the University of Pennsylvania for a postdoctoral fellowship in the Center for Mitochondrial and Epigenomic Medicine with Doug Wallace. There, he worked on mitochondria-mitochondria interactions, mitochondrial reprogramming of the nuclear (epi)genome, and mitochondrial stress pathophysiology along with Bruce McEwen at the Rockefeller University. He joined the faculty of Columbia University in 2015.

Dr. Picard’s Mitochondrial PsychoBiology Laboratory investigates mechanisms of brain-body communication with a focus on mitochondria. Investigators and trainees in Dr. Picard’s translational research program combine clinical, cellular, and computational approaches to examine how psychosocial exposures impact mitochondrial structure and functions, and in turn, how energetic perturbations within mitochondria influence key brain-body processes involved in cognition, stress resilience, and aging.

Together with their collaborators, they work across organelle to organism to elucidate energetic principles that shape human health across the lifespan. Dr. Picard’s team has developed a mitochondrial health index (MHI) to study the mind-mitochondria connection, identified novel membrane structures for mitochondrial communication in humans, showed that cell-free mitochondrial DNA (cf-mtDNA) is a psychological stress-inducible molecule, developed a cellular lifespan model that recapitulates molecular longitudinal trajectories of human aging in vitro, and found that human hair greying is reversible and linked to life stress.