Dr. Damien Fair is originally from Winona, Minnesota. He obtained his B.A. degree from Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and his Master of Medical Science degree from the Physician Assistant program at the Yale University School of Medicine. After practicing as a Physician Assistant in the neurology department at Yale-New Haven Hospital, Dr. Fair pursued further education in the Neuroscience Graduate Program at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Dr. Fair’s laboratory focuses on mechanisms and principles that underlie child and adolescent brain development. The majority of this work uses functional MRI and resting state functional connectivity MRI to assess typical and atypical populations. His work cuts across both human and animal models using these non-invasive tools as a bridge between species. Dr. Fair has published more than 100 articles in high-impact research journals including Nature Neuroscience, Molecular Psychiatry, Neuron, PLoS, PNAS, Science, and Psychological Science, and his work has been cited well over 17,000 times. His research has been funded by grants from the Gates Foundation, McDonnell Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Fair has an extensive international network of collaborators. He has received many awards, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers issued by President Barack Obama and the White House.
Dr. Fair is strongly committed to both teaching and public outreach. He was the founding Director of the OHSU Fellowship for Diversity in Research, an initiative that aims to increase the number of underrepresented postdocs and junior faculty at the university. Dr. Fair also organized the Youth Engaged in Science (YES) Initiative at OHSU, a multi-faceted program aimed at exposing underrepresented middle and high school students to scientific research and related careers. He has continued this legacy of outreach in his current role as a founding Co-Director of the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain (MIDB) at the University of Minnesota.