Bio

Suparna Choudhury is an interdisciplinary researcher and writer, trained in cognitive neuroscience, transcultural psychiatry and creative writing. In her research, she examines the implications of the new brain sciences for health and society with a special interest in how neuroscience informs the ways we understand ourselves and our predicaments. Suparna earned a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience focusing on the social brain in adolescence at University College London. She pursued interests in philosophy of mind at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University, Montreal. She went on to direct an interdisciplinary research team between the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Humboldt University in Berlin, co-founding the research and teaching program, Critical Neuroscience. In her current role as Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Culture, Mind & Brain Program at the Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University, she is focused on the cultural contexts of neuroscience and mental health with ongoing projects related to youth-led research on adolescent mental health, neuroscience and society, cities and psychosis, and youth participation in climate activism.

 

As a writer, she works as Lead Poetry Editor of the Pitkin Review, co-founder of Poetry Clinic, and is currently focused on a hybrid fiction work for her MFA thesis at Goddard College. She runs Velvet Thursday, a Montreal-based literary salon for emerging writers, and is the recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts grant for Poetics of Home, an ongoing project which draws on narrative methods and urban soundscapes to explore states of belonging and estrangement. She is a second-generation Indian immigrant, born in London and living in Montreal.