Antonio Convit, M.D.

Antonio Convit, M.D.

Deputy Director
Nathan S. Kline Institute
845-398-5502

Antonio Convit, MD, has been a member of the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research since 1991 and is a Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine, and Radiology at the NYU School of Medicine. Antonio is a native Venezuelan, who earned his undergraduate degree in Epidemiology and Environmental Health at George Washington University, Washington D.C., and his medical degree at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine. He completed his residency in Psychiatry at New York Medical Center and has been part of the NYS OMH and NYU School of Medicine his whole career.

Dr. Convit has had a wide array of scientific interests and has been funded by the National Institutes of Health in three separate areas. Early in his research career he concentrated on studies of psychiatric violence, particularly among forensic patients. As he became interested in more direct brain assessments, and by interacting with other researchers utilizing MRI and PET imaging tools, his research interests shifted to understanding the medical mechanisms that were associated with non-degenerative cognitive dysfunction in older age. As the logical extension of this previous work, more recently he has focused on the impact of obesity and obesity-associated metabolic dysregulation, including type 2 diabetes, on cognitive functions and brain structural integrity.

Dr. Convit has published over 130 articles, the last 60 of which have focused on the impact of obesity and associated metabolic disease on brain health, an area where he is a nationally recognized authority. Dr. Convit’s current work seeks to better understand brain health in the context of physical health. This is in keeping with current health trends where the goal is to treat individuals more holistically, recognizing that medical health affects brain health and vice versa. Having demonstrated that obesity affects the ability of adolescents to learn and do well in school, Dr. Convit started the Banishing Obesity and Diabetes (BODY) Project, which is a public heath outreach program where adolescents in public schools, after consent from the parents, get evaluated medically and then receive an easy-to-understand summary of their medical numbers together with lifestyle advice as to how to improve those medical numbers. This program has been very successful and conducted nearly four thousand evaluations.