Dr. Murray is the Franklin Mint Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA, where he serves as Director of the Eating Disorders Program, and the Director of the Translational Research in Eating Disorders Program at UCLA. Dr. Murray is an active clinician-researcher, and has authored more than 250 scientific manuscripts, books and book chapters, and has lectured extensively both nationally and internationally. He holds professional memberships on executive and editorial boards of several high-ranking journals and was recently recognized by PubMed’s Expertscape as the world’s leading expert in body image research. Through his program of research, which uses behavioral, psychophysiological, and neuroimaging methods, he aims to understand the biological and psychological processes underpinning eating disorders and develop improved treatments to optimize patient outcomes. To date, Dr. Murray’s first authored publications have featured in top tier medical journals, such as JAMA, psychiatry journals, such as JAMA Psychiatry, pediatric journals such as JAMA Pediatrics, neurology journals such as JAMA Neurology, neuroscience journals such as Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, psychology journals, such as Psychological Medicine, and eating disorder journals, such as the International Journal of Eating Disorders.

Dr. Murray has made several landmark contributions to the field of eating disorders to date. He recently conducted the largest analysis of patient outcomes in the history of anorexia nervosa, which offered key directions for future research in improving treatment response. His work has also been instrumental in elucidating the phenomenology of eating disorders in males, mapping out novel symptom presentations and illness phenotypes. In tandem, his work has started to unravel the complex neurobiology of eating disorders in adolescence – a period of rapid brain development. For instance, he recently completed the first neuroimaging assessment of binge eating disorder in children, illustrating that profound structural and functional brain abnormalities can be seen in children with binge eating disorder as young as 9 years of age. He has also developed novel and advanced computational neuroimaging methods to assess microscopic brain structure in children with anorexia nervosa, which led to the novel discovery of microscopic abnormalities in brain tissue in children with anorexia nervosa. He has published novel studies assessing the trajectory of symptom pathways throughout treatment, which have offered unique insights into treatment mechanisms alongside data relating to treatment efficacy at end-of-treatment. 

Alongside his research efforts, Dr. Murray is tirelessly devoted to the development of clinical services in underserved populations, and to mentoring the next generation of scientists and clinicians. He has developed gold standard eating disorder clinics at UCLA, and previously at Los Angeles General Medical Center, where he has been passionate around removing barriers to specialized care and has actively translated his research and clinical programs into several languages. In further removing barriers to scientific expertise, Dr. Murray has been active in sharing scientific information via media and social media platforms, and has recently featured on CNN and NBC, and in the New York Times and Washington Post, ensuring broad scope access to his work within our community. Dr. Murray is also an active mentor to graduate students, medical students, psychiatry residents and fellows, and junior faculty, and mentees have published a cumulative total of over 700 peer-reviewed articles in international journals.