Faculty Feature: Mike Esterman
Mike Esterman
Associate Professor; Principal Investigator, National Center for PTSD – VA Boston Healthcare System
esterman@bu.edu
Profile
Dr. Esterman is an Associate Professor at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, Core Faculty for the Center for Brain Recovery, and a Principal Investigator for the National Center for PTSD – VA Boston Healthcare System.
Q&A with Mike Esterman
What is your current research focus, and how does it align with the Center for Brain Recovery’s mission?
I study how people stay on task, and how the brain supports goal-directed behavior over time. In everyday life, we constantly juggle competing demands in the face of internal and external distractions. Our ability to sustain focus underlies nearly all complex behavior and real-world functioning, from walking and driving to meeting the demands of work, relationships, and health.
Difficulty with sustained attention is pervasive across brain injury, neurodegeneration, and neuropsychiatric conditions, across the lifespan. My lab uses behavioral paradigms alongside neuroimaging and non-invasive brain stimulation to understand how large-scale brain networks support attention and cognitive control and how we can optimize attention through targeted interventions. This aligns closely with CBR’s mission, because disruptions in these processes are common after brain injury and can limit patients’ recovery and engagement in treatment.
How did you initially become involved and/or interested in your field?
As a Psychology major at Penn, I actually found attention to be the most confusing aspect of cognition. After college, I worked as a research assistant at the Boston VA with stroke patients who had severe spatial attention deficits (hemispatial neglect). I was assigned to the project because I had a car! That experience sparked a lasting fascination with why so much of our sensory world falls outside awareness. From there, my career took several turns into more basic cognitive neuroscience and eventually back toward translational work. That path taught me that careers don’t have to be linear.
What brought you to Boston University?
After graduate school and postdoctoral training focused primarily on basic cognitive neuroscience, I wanted to be somewhere that valued both basic science and translational applications. The partnership between BU and VA Boston was the perfect fit- strong neuroscience, access to clinical populations, and a culture that supports interdisciplinary collaboration. I’ve been fortunate to work alongside engineers, psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, and cognitive scientists, and to build a research program with broad translational reach.
What research are you most proud of?
Two answers, one methodological and one clinical. I’m proud of the development of the gradual Continuous Performance Task (gradCPT). What began as a more sensitive way to measure sustained attention has grown into a broadly used tool, from studying technology use to characterizing attention dysregulation in PTSD and serving as an outcome measure in clinical trials. It helped shift thinking about attention as continuously fluctuating rather than simply “on” or “off.”
I’m also proud of our work aimed at better understanding and preventing suicide risk. By examining inhibitory control, sustained attention, and related brain activity, particularly in Veterans in crisis, we aim to identify objective markers and intervention targets that can strengthen prevention efforts.
What do you consider the most pressing challenge in your field today, and how is your research addressing this challenge?
A major challenge is translating mechanistic cognitive neuroscience into meaningful improvements in real-world function after injury or illness. We have detailed pictures of how brain networks work, but turning those insights into predictive tools and effective interventions remains difficult.
My lab addresses this in several ways: by designing paradigms that capture attentional fluctuations in home and mobile settings and linking them to real-world outcomes; by using more naturalistic neuroimaging approaches, such as movie-watching paradigms with dynamic emotional content; and by developing neuroimaging tools that can eventually be deployed outside the lab.
If you could give one piece of advice to someone just starting out in your field, what would it be?
Find your people. Work with collaborators you respect and trust, who challenge you intellectually and support you personally. Science is hard. Don’t do it alone.
Learn More about Mike Esterman