Michael Jacob is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UCSF and a Staff Psychiatrist at the San Francisco VA Health Care System. Dr. Jacob joined BIEEGL in 2015 when he was a psychiatry resident at UCSF and continued to work in the lab as a postdoctoral research fellow supported by the VA’s Advanced Fellowship in Psychiatric Neuroscience. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley and received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Rochester.
Dr. Jacob is interested in bidirectional interactions between physical and mental health. He often wonders: How is the brain different from a computer? Why do we suffer, while computers don’t? These questions have led him to investigate neuroscientific questions from the perspective of embodied cognition: people have active, sensing, metabolizing bodies that fundamentally shape neural signaling and how we feel. His current work focuses on how metabolism constrains neurocognition and contributes to psychiatric symptoms. Experimentally, this is achieved through studies of neurometabolic coupling, employing simultaneous recordings of electroencephalography (EEG) with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in human participants with schizophrenia and major depressive disorder. Dr. Jacob is a board certified and licensed psychiatrist. His clinical interests include the intersection of biological psychiatry with cognitive and psychodynamic psychotherapies. He enjoys teaching and mentoring students and residents.