MCI Symposium

Dr. Ranjan Duara is the Medical Director of the Wien Center for Alzheimer’s Disease and Memory Disorders at Mount Sinai Medical Center and holds the Denis C. Cole Family Chair in Alzheimer’s Disease Research. In addition, Dr. Duara serves as the Associate Director and leader of the Clinical Core of the 1Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, a research collaboration between four university medical centers and Mount Sinai Medical Center in Florida. Dr. Duara is a Courtesy Professor of Neurology at the University of Florida College of Medicine, Gainesville, Florida, and the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, Florida International University, Miami, Florida. He serves as the Principal Investigator of the State of Florida Dementia Brain Bank Program.

Dr. Duara is a clinical neurologist with a special interest in the use of brain imaging for the diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other causes of Adult Cognitive Disorders. Through his research in this area, he has helped to enhance what is known about the biology of Alzheimer’s disease.

He completed his undergraduate medical education at Christian Medical College, Vellore, South India, completed two years of neurology residency with Dr. Noshir Wadia at Grant Medical College in Bombay, India, followed by residencies in internal medicine and neurology in the United Kingdom, and in neurology at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. He then completed a four-year fellowship in neuroscience and neuroimaging of aging, with Dr Stanley Rapaport at the National Institute on Aging (National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD).

Dr. Duara’s research has focused primarily on early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, neuroimaging, genetic epidemiology, and the methodology for staging the transition from normal cognitive aging to dementia. He has contributed to more than 250 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and has been an investigator in observational studies on aging, as well as clinical trials of novel agents for the treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease. Dr. Duara is also the chair and organizer of the Mild Cognitive Impairment Symposium, which is held annually in Miami Beach.

Dr. Adam M. Brickman is a Professor of Neuropsychology at Columbia University, with appointments in Neurology, the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain, and the Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center. He earned his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of the City University of New York and completed a fellowship at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center.

Dr. Brickman’s research leverages advanced neuroimaging techniques to explore cognitive aging, dementia, and the impact of vascular disease on Alzheimer’s disease. His work focuses on white matter abnormalities, age-related changes in brain structure, and their cognitive consequences. Using structural MRI, voxel-based morphometry, and novel analytic techniques, he investigates how factors like cognitive reserve and cerebrovascular risk shape aging and cognition. He also applies neuroimaging and neuropsychological assessments to study psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia and dementia.

Dr. Howard Chertkow is a practicing cognitive neurologist at Toronto’s Baycrest Health Sciences Centre, where he Is also Senior Scientist and Chair in Cognitive Neurology and Innovation at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute. Prior to 2018 he was a Professor at McGill University in Montreal Canada. He is now a Professor in the Dept. of Medicine (Neurology) at University of Toronto. At Baycrest he is also director of the new Bank Family Clinical Trials Unit and the Kimel Family Central for Brain Health.

Dr. Chertkow is an active researcher in the area of dementia. His major areas of research interest include early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease and prediction of deterioration in individuals with Mild Cognitive Impairment, and therapy of cognitive disorders in Alzheimer Disease and Frontotemporal dementia using neuromodulation approaches such as transcranial direct current stimulation. Dr. Chertkow’s lab is now focused on developing transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) as ancillary therapy in elderly individuals with neurodegenerative disease.

Thirty-two of his publications have over 100 citations, and three of the publications have been cited over 2000 times. He is senior author of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), which has become an international standard for diagnosis of MCI, has been cited over 21,000 times and is the most cited paper in the field of neurology in the world in the 21st century. Dr. Chertkow is on Stanford University’s 2020 list of “Top 2% Cited Scientists”.

In 2014 Dr. Chertkow became the Scientific Director for the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging (CCNA), a national organization established by the Canadian government via CIHR and partners. CCNA, now approved for a five year Phase 3 beginning in April 2024, is the largest grant every awarded in dementia research in Canada, and brings together 320 leading Canadian dementia researchers to establish national teams and platforms to produce breakthroughs in the diagnosis and treatment of the dementing illnesses.

Dr. María Corrada is a Professor in the Department of Neurology and the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, Irvine. She is also leader of the 90+ Core at the UCI Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. She received her bachelor’s degree at the University of Puerto Rico, and completed a masters in Biostatistics and a doctorate in Psychiatric Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, MD. Early in her career, she worked on projects involving the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, including some of the earliest prospective studies of estrogen replacement therapy, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and folate as protective factors for Alzheimer’s disease.

She moved to UCI to help establish The 90+ Study, for which she is a multiple principal investigator. The 90+ Study is a longitudinal epidemiological study of aging and dementia of more than 2,000 well-characterized people aged 90 years and older. Some of her most important contributions have been estimating prevalence and incidence of dementia, as well as investigating the role of multiple pathologies to dementia in this age group. In addition, Dr. Corrada is multiple principal investigator for Life After 90 a recently established life-course study of cognitive impairment and dementia in a racially and ethnically diverse cohort of over 1,000 people aged 90 and older in Northern California.

Dr. Corrada’s research interests include population-based longitudinal studies, the epidemiology of dementia, and through imaging and autopsy studies, identifying factors that correlate with the presence of brain pathologies. Much of her work has been dedicated to understanding the cognitive and physical health of the oldest-old, a rapidly growing, but understudied population.

Dr. Christos Davatzikos is the Wallace T. Miller Sr. Professor of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of the AI2D Center. Dr. Davatzikos holds secondary appointments in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics and the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at Penn, as well as in the Bioengineering and Applied Mathematics graduate groups.

He obtained his undergraduate degree from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece in 1989; and his Ph.D. degree from Johns Hopkins in 1994 on a Fulbright scholarship. Dr. Davatzikos then joined the faculty in Radiology, and later in Computer Science, where he founded and directed the Neuroimaging Laboratory. In 2002, Dr. Davatzikos moved to Penn, where he founded and directed the Biomedical Image Analysis section.

His interests are in medical image analysis and machine learning. He oversees a diverse research program focusing on AI methods in Neuroimaging, as well as its application to clinical studies on aging and Alzheimer’s Disease, neuropsychiatric diseases, and brain cancer.

Dr. Davatzikos has served on a variety of scientific journal editorial boards and grant review committees. He is an IEEE fellow, and a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and a member of the US Academy of Radiology Research.

Dr. Christopher M. Filley, now retired, was Director of the Behavioral Neurology Section, and Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry, at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He also served as Senior Scientific Advisor for the Marcus Institute for Brain Health.

Dr. Filley evaluated patients referred for behavioral neurology consultation at the Neurobehavior Clinic of the University of Colorado Hospital, providing a regional resource for expert subspecialty care for complex disorders of cognition. Although Alzheimer’s disease has been a major focus of his work, his primary interest is in the behavioral neurology of white matter, including neurologic, psychiatric, neuropsychological, neuroimaging, and neuropathological aspects of a wide variety of white matter disorders. Through his role in the CU Alzheimer’s and Cognition Center Clinical Core, Dr. Filley participated in observational and clinical trials for potential Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia therapeutics.

He is also the author of three monographs – Neurobehavioral Anatomy, The Behavioral Neurology of White Matter, and White Matter Dementia – and he is the senior editor of the textbook Behavioral Neurology & Neuropsychiatry. Dr. Filley recently published an article in The Conversation on the importance of white matter to understanding the brain.

Dr. Lawrence Honig is a Professor of Neurology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (New York, NY), in the Department of Neurology (Division of Aging and Dementia), the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain, the Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center, and at New York Presbyterian Hospital. He directs the New York State Center of Excellence for Alzheimer’s Disease, co-directs the Lewy Body Disease Association Research Center of Excellence, and the Progressive Supranuclear Palsy Center of Care, and is Deputy Director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

Dr. Honig obtained his MD medical degree from the University of Miami (Miami, Florida), and his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley (Berkeley, California). He underwent postgraduate internship in Medicine and residency in Neurology training at Stanford University Medical Center (California). He served on the faculty of the Neurology departments at Stanford University Medical Center, and then at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, prior to his arrival at Columbia University, where he has been on the faculty since the year 2000. He is a neuroscientist and board-certified clinical neurologist, with UCNS subspecialty certifications in Behavioral Neurology and Neuropsychiatry, and Geriatric Neurology. His clinical specialization focusses on Alzheimer’s Disease, Lewy Body Dementia, Frontotemporal Dementias, Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, immune-mediated encephalitides, and other disorders of nervous system aging and degeneration. He is a principal investigator on both observational and clinical drug trials for neurodegenerative conditions including Alzheimer Disease, Frontotemporal Degeneration, Lewy Body Disease, and Progressive Supranuclear Palsy.

Dr. Courtney Lane-Donovan studied biological engineering and biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She then completed her MD/PhD at UT Southwestern. She trained with Dr. Joachim Herz studying ApoE receptor signaling in transgenic mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Lane-Donovan identified a role for reelin, a protein that is vital for brain development, in protecting older rodents against amyloid beta, one of the primary pathology proteins that accumulate in Alzheimer’s disease. As a fourth-year neurology resident at the University of California, San Francisco, and then continuing as an R25 postdoctoral researcher, Courtney will be studying lysosomal health and function in models of aging.

Dr. Ronald Petersen is a national leader in the field of Alzheimer’s research. He is the director of the Mayo Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and the Mayo Clinic Study on Aging. He has authored over 550 peer-reviewed articles and edited five books on memory disorders, aging, and Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Petersen received his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Minnesota and graduated from Mayo Medical School in 1980. He joined the staff of the Mayo Clinic in 1986. He became the Cora Kanow Professor of Alzheimer’s Disease Research in 2000, and was named the Mayo Clinic Distinguished Investigator in 2011.

Dr. Ronald Petersen is one of the recipients of the 2004 MetLife Award for Medical Research in Alzheimer’s Disease and the 2005 Potamkin Prize for Research in Picks, Alzheimer’s, and Related Disorders of the American Academy of Neurology. He also received the inaugural Ronald and Nancy Reagan Research Institute Award in 2004 from the Alzheimer’s Association and the inaugural Leon Thal Prize of the Lou Ruvo Brain Institute in 2007. In 2012, he received the Khachaturian award of the Alzheimer’s Association and the Henry Wisniewski Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.

In 2011, he was appointed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services to serve as the chair of the Advisory Committee on Research, Care, and Services for the National Alzheimer’s Project Act and was appointed to the World Dementia Council in 2014 by UK Prime Minister David Cameron.

Dr. Stephen Salloway is the founding Director of the Memory and Aging Program at Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. He is the Martin M. Zucker Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and Professor of Neurology at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. He received his MD from Stanford Medical School and completed residencies in neurology and psychiatry at Yale University.

His research focuses on biomarker and drug development for prevention and early treatment of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). During his time at Brown, the Butler Hospital Memory and Aging Program (MAP) has become an internationally recognized center for clinical research in Alzheimer’s disease. The MAP has helped pioneer the use of PET ligands for amyloid and tau to study the evolution of AD pathophysiology in autosomal dominant and sporadic AD. The program has had a lead role in testing targeted treatments, such as BACE inhibitors and monoclonal antibodies, alone and in combination, to lower amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, as well as novel approaches, such as deep brain stimulation, to slow the progression of AD. The MAP is developing new strategies using genetic testing and brain imaging to recruit cognitively normal elderly at increased risk for AD for prevention studies.

Dr. Salloway has published more than 370 scientific articles and abstracts and has edited 3 books. These include lead authorship on pivotal trials in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, Nature, and JAMA Neurology. Dr. Salloway is a past president of the American Neuropsychiatric Association, a fellow of the American Academy of Neurology, and a member of the American Neurological Association. He serves on the Steering Committees for landmark NIH studies such as the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer’s Network, and the Alzheimer’s Disease Clinical Trial Consortium. He is a scientific reviewer for the National Institutes of Health and for more than 30 journals, universities, and research foundations. Dr. Salloway lectures widely on prevention and early intervention for Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Paola Sebastiani is Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine and Director of the BERD Center/Director of the Center for QMDS; Co-director of the BHDSC. 

She is a multidisciplinary biostatistician, with a long track record of developing new methodologies in Bayesian statistics, decision theory, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and statistical experimental design, in addition to teaching, mentoring, and leading interdisciplinary research projects. She introduced innovative Bayesian techniques for the analysis of genomic and genetic data and was a pioneer in using networks to model the genetic and phenotypic basis of the complications of sickle cell anemia. She is also a renowned biostatistician in the fields of the biology and epidemiology of human aging and longevity: she introduced original methods to design observational studies of human longevity, and to discover genetic and non-genetic risk factors that contribute to healthy aging.

She is Co-PI of the NIH funded Longevity Consortium, and of the Long Life Family Study. She is also multiple PI of a project to characterize the molecular targets of the protective APOE2 allele, and of a project that will generate multi-omics profiles of humans and other species to discover targets for healthy aging (Integrative longevity Omics).

Her current research focuses on the genetics and epidemiology of extreme human longevity, analysis of rare genetic variants, and integrative analysis of multi-omics data using statistical and machine learning methods.