Core Leaders

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.

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.

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.

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.