Collaborators
Giovanni Coppola, MD - Coppola Lab
Dr. Coppola received his MD and completed his neurology residency at the Federico II University, Napoli, Italy, and is currently an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of California Los Angeles. The long-term goal of his work is to advance the understanding of the genetic architecture of neuropsychiatric disorders by adopting a combination of genetic (sequencing, genotyping), genomic (gene expression, epigenetics), and bioinformatic (integrative network analysis) approaches. As Director of the UCLA Semel Center for Informatics and Personalized Genomics he is interested in setting up an infrastructure for large-scale genomic studies and research access to the electronic medical record system.
Howard Rosen, MD - Center for Psychophysiology and Behavior
Dr. Howard Rosen is director of the CPB and an Associate Professor at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center in the Department of Neurology. After receiving his M.D. from Boston University School of Medicine, he trained in internal medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and completed his residency at UCSF. Dr. Rosen pursued fellowship training in brain imaging at the Washington University School of Medicine and then returned to UCSF to join the Memory and Aging Center in 1999. His primary area of interest is in the organization of emotional systems in the brain and how these systems are affected in different forms of neurodegenerative disease.
Jennifer Yokoyama - Neurogenetics in Aging
Dr. Yokoyama is currently an Assistant Professor at the Memory and Aging Center, where she is beginning a research program in neurogenetics of aging. Specifically, she is interested in the effect genotype can have on brain physiology, behavior and cognition in healthy older adults, and how this is related to increased vulnerability to (or protection from) neurodegenerative processes during aging. She is also particularly interested in understanding these effects in diverse ethnic populations. Dr. Yokoyama's long-term goal is to understand how variation across the entire genome confers risk for particular types of neurodegeneration for purposes of early treatment and therapeutic intervention.
Bruce Miller, MD - Frontotemporal Dementia: Genes, Images and Emotions
Dr. Miller holds the A.W. and Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professorship in Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He directs the busy UCSF dementia center where patients in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond receive comprehensive clinical evaluations. His goal is the delivery of model care to all of the patients who enter the clinical and research programs at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center (MAC).
Dr. Miller is a behavioral neurologist focused on dementia with special interests in brain and behavior relationships as well as the genetic and molecular underpinnings of disease. He is the principal investigator of the NIH-sponsored Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (ADRC) and program project on FTD called Frontotemporal Dementia: Genes, Imaging and Emotions.
Pascual Sanchez-Juan, MD PhD - Hospital Marques de Valdecilla
Pascual Sanchez-Juan is a neurologist and geneticist in Santander, Spain, who runs a biobank of samples for the Spanish Dementia Genetics Consortium (DEGESCO). He collaborates with Dr. Lee on genetics projects to identify novel genetic variants that are either protective or risk factors for degenerative disease.
Marilu Gorno Tempini, MD, PhD - Language & Neurobiology Laboratory
Dr. Gorno Tempini is a behavioral neurologist with a doctorate degree in imaging neuroscience and directs the Language & Neurobiology Laboratory at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center (MAC). She obtained her medical degree and clinical specialty training in neurology in Italy. Dr. Gorno Tempini’s main focus was in behavioral neurology, particularly the neural basis of higher cognitive functions such as language and memory.In 2001, Dr. Gorno Tempini began her work at the MAC as a fellow and has since become a full professor. For the last 12 years she has applied her expertise in cognitive neurology and neuroimaging to the study of neurodegenerative disease, in particular primary progressive aphasia(PPA) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). She has extensive experience in neurology and neuroscience and in the use of behavioral and neuroimaging paradigms to study language symptoms and their neural mechanisms.
Fermin Moreno-Izco, MD - Hospital Donostia, Institute Biodonostia, Spain
Fermin Moreno-Izco is a neurologist in San Sebastian, Spain who collaborates with Dr. Lee in studying progranulin mutation families in the Basque country. He and his team have performed extensive clinical evaluations of these families and participate in the Genetic Frontotemporal Dementia Initiative (GENFI).
William Seeley, MD - Selective Vulnerability Research Lab
Dr. Seeley attended medical school at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), where he first encountered patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in 1999, during a research elective with Bruce Miller. He then completed a neurology residency at Harvard Medical School, training at the Massachusetts General and Brigham & Women's Hospitals. Returning to UCSF for a Behavioral Neurology fellowship, with Bruce Miller, Dr. Seeley developed expertise in the differential diagnosis and treatment of patients with neurodegenerative disease. Struck by the focality of these illnesses, he began to question how events at the molecular level could target small subsets of the brain's more than 20 billion neurons. This biological problem, referred to as selective vulnerability, has become the primary focus of Dr. Seeley’s research.