Leadership

Beau Ances is a principal investigator for AABC, and leads the team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He is a neurologist who sees patients for a variety of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and related dementias. Ances has been a Professor of Neurology at WUSM for eleven years. He has written or co-written more than 200 academic papers concerning neurology

Ances has research interests in HIV associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND), HIV associated peripheral neuropathy, neuroAIDS, progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML), neurodegenerative diseases, mild cognitive impairment, aging, cognitive function, paraneoplastic disorders, post concussive syndrome, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).

Ances Bioimaging Lab

Susan Bookheimer is a clinical neuropsychologist specializing in pre-surgical and intraoperative assessments for patients with epilepsy, brain tumors, vascular lesions, Parkinson’s disease, and dementia. Her research uses brain imaging, particularly functional MRI, applied to a wide range of disorders including autism and Alzheimers, as well as in typical development and normal aging.

Bookheimer served as the AABC UCLA site principal investigator through December 1, 2023. As of July 1, 2024, Bookheimer retired from her full-time faculty position at UCLA transitioning her AABC UCLA MPI leadership role to Robert Welsh, MD.

The overarching aim of David Salat’s work is to understand mechanisms of neural disease and to implement novel approaches to reduce the impact of disease on the brain, cognition and clinical status. Clinically, there are two main clinical foci to his research. At the MGH Martinos Center, he directs the Brain Aging and Dementia Laboratory, with a research focus on understanding systemic and neural mechanisms of age-associated cognitive decline and dementia. A major focus of this work is to understand cerebrovascular contributions to brain aging and dementia. He is also the MGH site Principal Investigator for the Human Connectome Project – Mapping the Human Connectome with Typical Aging multisite effort.

Essa Yacoub’s research interests are in developing and applying high field magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and functional MRI (fMRI) for human applications. His work has emphasized pushing the spatial and temporal resolution limits of fMRI using high magnetic fields and MRI pulse sequence developments. With the ability to non-invasively monitor the working human brain with such high degrees of spatial and temporal precision, the aim is to map and understand intrinsic functional architectures and neuronal inter-connections.

Beau Ances is a principal investigator for AABC, and leads the team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He is a neurologist who sees patients for a variety of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and related dementias. Ances has been a Professor of Neurology at WUSM for eleven years. He has written or co-written more than 200 academic papers concerning neurology

Ances has research interests in HIV associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND), HIV associated peripheral neuropathy, neuroAIDS, progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML), neurodegenerative diseases, mild cognitive impairment, aging, cognitive function, paraneoplastic disorders, post concussive syndrome, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).

Ances Bioimaging Lab

Steven Arnold is the Translational Neurology Head and Managing Director of the Interdisciplinary Brain Center, a collaboration of  the Departments of Neurology, Psychiatry and the Martinos Center for Neuroimaging. Its mission is to facilitate the discovery, development, and implementation of promising therapeutics and associated diagnostics for individuals with complex brain disorders that affect cognition, behavior and emotion. Neurodegenerative diseases are major disease interests of the Interdisciplinary Brain Center.

Arnold has conducted longstanding research on neurodegenerative disease pathology, molecular biomarkers and therapeutics for cognitive decline and psychiatric syndromes in late life and has led broad clinical and translational research programs. He has authored over 300 scientific articles, reviews and chapters. Current scientific interests include biomarkers in brain aging and dementias, metabolic factors driving dementia, and protective factors that account for cognitive resilience, all towards accelerating therapeutics discovery and development in early phase and proof-of-concept clinical trials for neurocognitive disorders.

Ganesh Babulal is interested in investigating the relationship between cognitive function and mental health and its impact on the daily living activities of those with chronic neurological diseases. Specific research projects include characterizing functional changes in older adults using Alzheimer’s disease biomarkers, predicting global decline in aging using neurobehavioral markers, assessing how social forces (e.g. discrimination, chronic stress, racism) influence health and well-being among racial and ethnic minorities, and developing/validating effective educational programs to improve and prolong functional outcomes in aging.

Susan Bookheimer is a clinical neuropsychologist specializing in pre-surgical and intraoperative assessments for patients with epilepsy, brain tumors, vascular lesions, Parkinson’s disease, and dementia. Her research uses brain imaging, particularly functional MRI, applied to a wide range of disorders including autism and Alzheimers, as well as in typical development and normal aging.

Bookheimer served as the AABC UCLA site principal investigator through December 1, 2023. As of July 1, 2024, Bookheimer retired from her full-time faculty position at UCLA transitioning her AABC UCLA MPI leadership role to Robert Welsh, MD.

Carlos Cruchaga is the Barbara Burton & Reuben Morriss III Professor of Psychiatry with joint appointments at Genetics, and Neurology at Washington University School of Medicine. Cruchaga is a human genomicist with expertise in multiomics, informatics, and neurodegeneration.  He completed his PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology in 2005 at the University of Navarra in Spain. During his first postdoc with Dr. Pastor he conducted statistical human genetics studies focused on Alzheimers disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD). He then moved to Dr. Goate’s Lab to complete his training in quantitative human genomics. Dr. Cruchaga established his laboratory at Washington University in 2011 to study the genetic architecture of neurodegenerative diseases. His interests are focused on using human genomic and other -omic data (proteomics, metabolomics, and lipidomics) to identify and understand the biological processes that lead to AD, PD, frontotemporal dementia, and other neurodegenerative processes. He is the founding director of the NeuroGenomics and Informatics Center at Washington University. The Cruchaga lab can be found at cruchagalab.wustl.edu.

Mirella Díaz-Santos, PhD is a Spanish-English bilingual and bicultural neuropsychologist, and an Assistant Professor In-Residence in the Department of Neurology with a dual appointment with the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine. Dr. Díaz-Santos is the director and founder of the “Equity for Latinx-Hispanic Healthy Aging (ELHA) Lab,” at UCLA Easton Center for Alzheimer’s Research and Care in Neurology,  with a focus on prevention, and early detection/diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) in Hispanic and Latinx communities.  Her area of focus is the science of recruitment and retention by the implementation of participatory mixed-methods, and multi-level interventions transforming healthcare systems, academic infrastructures, and communities equipped to foster ADRD research accessibility, and inclusion.

Dara G. Ghahremani, PhD is a research professor and neuroscientist in the Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences and Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Behavior at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles). His research aims to understand self-regulation, its brain basis, how it changes across the lifespan, and is weakened in people with mental health problems. He also examines how self-regulation may be strengthened using pharmacological and behavioral interventions. He uses multiple neuroimaging techniques, including functional MRI (fMRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET). His studies examine individuals across the lifespan, from children and adolescents to older adults, and include both healthy control participants and those with mental health problems, especially substance use disorders. The interventions employed for potential enhancement of self-regulation include pharmacological agents that show promise for enhancing cognitive function and non-pharmacological approaches that promote autonomic balance. Dr. Ghahremani received his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Psychology Department at Stanford University and postdoctoral training at UCLA.

Matthew Glasser’s research focuses on developing new brain imaging preprocessing and analysis methods and applying them to solve important neuroanatomical problems. Together these contributions comprise the core of the Human Connectome Project’s approach to brain imaging acquisition, analysis, and data sharing, and they enabled the generation of a new multi-modal map of the human cerebral cortex.  Current work focuses on developing and validating multi-modal non-invasive MRI-based imaging data phenotypes, including architectural measures such as myelination, functional measures such as fMRI activation, structural and functional connectivity, and perfusion measures from arterial spin labeling to study brain aging in healthy adults using a longitudinal design. Other work explores individual variability in human brain areas in an effort to better understand inter-individual differences. His long-term research focus is to bring connectome-style methods to bear on clinical problems while continuing to address outstanding methodological and neuroanatomical issues in brain imaging. As a neuroradiologist, he sees his primary role as providing imaging expertise to other clinicians to help them address clinical problems and to maximize their chance for success by using the best brain imaging methods available.

Dr. Glasser’s lab can be found at https://sites.wustl.edu/vanessenlab/, and the Human Connectome Project users mailing list can be reached at hcp-users@humanconnectome.org.

Dr. Harms is a systems neuroscientist with a quantitative background and expertise in a wide range of MR imaging technologies, including functional, structural, and diffusion tensor imaging. He has led or co-led the MR imaging acquisition of a number of multi-site projects, including the HCP Young-Adult study, the HCP Lifespan studies, and the international 37-site AMP SCZ consortium. For AABC, he is a co-leader of the Integrated Data Acquisition Core, where he oversees the neuroimaging protocol and its ongoing quality assurance.

Helen Lavretsky is a Professor In-Residence in the Department of Psychiatry and the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, a geriatric integrative psychiatrist with a federally funded research program in geriatric depression, cognition, and integrative mental health (NIMH, NCCIH, DOD, PCORI, and other). She directs the late-life mood, stress and wellness research program, and the integrative psychiatry and long-COVID clinical and research programs. She is the recipient of the Career Development Award from NIMH and the NCCIH, and other prestigious research awards. Her current research studies include investigations of mind-body therapies for mild cognitive impairment, chronic pain, and depression, and long-COVID syndrome. She is the Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, and the Fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, and the recipient of the Distinguished Investigator awards for research in geriatric psychiatry from the American College of Psychiatrists and the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry. She is the President of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry.

Pauline M. Maki is Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology and Obstetrics & Gynecology; Director of the Women’s Mental Health Research Program, and Research Director at the Center for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). For the past 25 years, she has led a program of NIH-funded research on women’s health, particularly women’s mental and cognitive health. She has more than 200 scientific publications on this topic. Her research addresses important issues in women’s health such as how hormonal changes at menopause and menopause symptoms affect women’s cognitive function, brain health and mood at midlife and the effect of menopausal hormone therapy and non-hormonal menopause intervention on cognition, brain health and mood. She is credited with the first neuroimaging study of estrogen and brain function in women.

Maki is past president of the North American Menopause Society (NAMS), Treasurer of the International Menopause Society and past chair of the Society for Women’s Health Research Interdisciplinary Network on Alzheimer’s Disease. She won the 2018 Woman in Science Award from the American Medical Women’s Association, the Thomas B. Clarkson Outstanding Clinical and Basic Science Research Award from the NAMS, and the 2023 Health Education Visionary Award from the Society for Women’s Health Research. She has won several NIH awards for her research and service, serves as a research and career mentor to many students and junior faculty, serves on executive committees for several women’s health advisory boards, and is a frequent international and national speaker. Her work is widely cited in the media, including in such outlets as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Fox News, National Public Radio, BBC, the Today Show, NBC News, ABC News, and the Guardian.

Dan Marcus is the Chief Scientific Officer of Flywheel and a Professor of Radiology at Washington University, where he is Director of the Computational Imaging Laboratory. He is the author of over 100 publications on topics ranging from scientific databases to automated brain network analysis and tumor segmentation. Marcus has led the development of a number of high impact informatics and computational platforms in support of biomedical imaging applications across many disease areas.   His work includes creation and ongoing direction of the open source XNAT platform, the Human Connectome Project Database, and the National Cancer Institute’s Integrative Imaging Informatics for Cancer Research (I3CR) program. Marcus was also the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Radiologics, Inc., which developed cloud-scale imaging informatics services for clinical trials and AI-powered patient diagnostics. Radiologics was acquired by Flywheel in 2021. He is a co-founder of Sora Neuroscience.

Marcus continues to provide leadership and technical insights across a broad swath of biomedical research. He is the director of Flywheel’s clinical division and federated data network. His passions include automated tumor quantification, brain health characterization, and database design for complex data. When not doing science, he can typically be found traveling to the mountains with his family, watching tennis or a ballgame, or chasing his dog down the damn street.

The overarching aim of David Salat’s work is to understand mechanisms of neural disease and to implement novel approaches to reduce the impact of disease on the brain, cognition and clinical status. Clinically, there are two main clinical foci to his research. At the MGH Martinos Center, he directs the Brain Aging and Dementia Laboratory, with a research focus on understanding systemic and neural mechanisms of age-associated cognitive decline and dementia. A major focus of this work is to understand cerebrovascular contributions to brain aging and dementia. He is also the MGH site Principal Investigator for the Human Connectome Project – Mapping the Human Connectome with Typical Aging multisite effort.