Dr. Michael J. Murphy is a staff psychiatrist with McLean OnTrack™, a program for first episode psychosis, a research associate at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute, and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

His research focuses on understanding the relationship between brain activity and the symptoms of psychosis. Dr. Murphy uses electroencephalography to study long-range connections between neuron populations, exploring how changes in these connections may serve as markers for clinical recovery and relapse. Additionally, he investigates the role of sleep in memory processing and how this relationship is disrupted in individuals with schizophrenia.

Dr. Murphy is also interested in how psychiatrists measure symptoms. He believes that a biological correlate of a symptom cannot be identified without a common definition of that symptom. In psychiatry, symptoms are assessed through clinical evaluation, which means that some aspects of symptom assessment are rater-dependent. With the use of novel computational resources and techniques, Dr. Murphy is working to identify replicable, objective measures of patient speech and behavior that are robustly correlated with consensus-derived symptom scales.