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MAC  Join the Team |
Staff
Neuropsychologists & Cognitive Neuroscientists
Links to the PubMed search engine may pull up articles written by other authors. 
Dr. Dronkers received her PhD degree in Neuropsychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1985. Nina Dronkers is a consultant to the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and specializes in adult speech and language disorders. Dr. Dronkers assists in the evaluation of those individuals with progressive changes in their speech or language skills and participates in ongoing research concerning language abilities in dementia. She is currently the Director of the Center for Aphasia and Related Disorders and the Chief of the Audiology and Speech Pathology Service at the Department of Veterans Affairs Northern California Health Care System. She also holds an appointment as Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Neurology and Linguistics at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Dronkers' expertise is in the field of Aphasia and in understanding the language and communication deficits that can occur with neurological disease. She has conducted extensive research in this area and in the localization of language functions in the brain.
Dr. Julene K. Johnson received her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Texas (Dallas) and a Bachelors of Music from Southern Methodist University. She did her postdoctoral training with Dr. Carl Cotman at UC Irvine. Dr. Johnson is a Cognitive Neuroscientist and Associate Professor of Neurology at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center. Dr. Johnson leads the California Non-Alzheimer Disease Diagnostic Reliability Consortium with UCSF, UCLA, UC Davis, UCSD, UC Irvine and USC. The purpose of this project is to evaluate diagnostic reliability and accuracy of non-Alzheimer disease dementias. She also studies the perception of music in dementia. Her research interests include cognitive and neuropathological studies of mild cognitive impairment, frontotemporal dementia and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. She is particularly interested in the frontal cortex and executive function, especially in the pre-clinical stages of dementia.
Dr. Kramer earned his Doctorate in Psychology at Baylor University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Martinez VA hospital. Dr. Kramer is board certified in clinical neuropsychology and serves on the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Clinical Neuropsychology. Dr. Kramer is a Clinical Professor of Neuropsychology in Neurology and the Director of the Memory and Aging Center Neuropsychology program. Dr. Kramer has been extensively involved in studying the cognitive changes associated with brain disorders for the past two decades. He has co-authored widely used neuropsychological measures of memory and executive functioning. Much of his work has been devoted to identifying the different ways in which neurodegenerative diseases affect memory and other abilities and in utilizing these differences to improve differential diagnosis in clinic. Presently, Dr. Kramer's active areas of research include studying the cognitive effects of cerebrovascular disease and frontotemporal dementia, identifying behavioral markers of pre-clinical Alzheimer's disease, and understanding the relationships between aging, hormones and behavior.
Judy Pa received her PhD in Psychology with an emphasis on Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of California, Irvine in 2007. She worked in the Laboratory of Cognitive Brain Research, under the direction of Dr. Greg Hickok, where she investigated the functional neuroanatomy of language. Specifically, her graduate work focused on elucidating the neural organization of sensory-motor networks for speech and music using functional MRI. Dr. Pa joined the UCSF Memory and Aging Center in 2007 to pursue clinical research in neurodegenerative diseases. She specializes in using cognitive, behavioral and neuroimaging methods to investigate Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), a preclinical stage of dementia. With these techniques, she aims to identify early predictors of conversion to dementia and characterize the track of cognitive and neural change during disease progression. In addition, she investigates memory and attention processes using functional MRI to better understand brain-behavior relationships in heterogeneous MCI subgroups.
Kate Possin was awarded her PhD in Clinical Psychology from UCSD in 2007. During her training at UCSD, she studied cognitive changes associated with Parkinson’s disease. She completed her internship in clinical neuropsychology at UCSF in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurology. Currently, Dr. Possin is a postdoctoral fellow in neuropsychology at the Memory and Aging Center. In July 2008, she was awarded a 3-year Larry L. Hillblom Fellowship to study spatial cognition in neurodegenerative disease, with a focus on Lewy Body Disorders. She aims to develop new anatomically-specific spatial cognitive measures, including virtual reality tests of navigation, that will be sensitive to the earliest cognitive changes in these disorders and that will help with early diagnosis. She is also interested in studying the neural substrates of spatial cognition and executive functioning using magnetic resonance imaging modalities, including voxel-based morphometry.
She received her BA in Psychology from Yale University, where she worked in a psychiatric epidemiology research unit at Yale School of Medicine. She went on to obtain a Master’s degree in Theology and PhD in Clinical Psychology at Fuller in Los Angeles. During her training she worked at USC researching the effects of estrogen and cortisol on the brain, and also researched cognition and social functioning in Klinefelter’s patients at Harbor UCLA Medical Center. After finishing her internship at the Martinez VA hospital and UC Davis Medical Center, she came to the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF to complete a 2-year post-doctoral fellowship in neuropsychology. Dr. Rankin is currently an Associate Professor in the UCSF Department of Neurology and works as a neuropsychologist with the UCSF Memory and Aging Center. Dr. Rankin’s research examines the neuroanatomic changes that can cause altered personality and social behavior in dementia. She is working to develop tests of social and emotional cognition that will allow earlier, more accurate differential diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases like frontotemporal dementia, semantic dementia, and corticobasal degeneration. She is the principal investigator on a number of grants that have allowed her to investigate topics such as artistic creativity in dementia, and the link between hormones and social behavior.
Indre Viskontas received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Toronto and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCLA in 2006. During her training at UCLA, Dr. Viskontas used high-resolution fMRI of healthy individuals and recordings of individual neural activity in patients with epilepsy to map memory processes in the medial temporal lobe. She joined the Memory and Aging Center in May of 2006 to study creativity and memory in patients with frontal and/or temporal lobar degeneration. Dr. Viskontas is also a classically-trained soprano with a Masters of Music degree from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and performs with regional opera companies and chamber music groups in the Bay Area.
Stephen Wilson received his BA in Linguistics from the University of Sydney and spent several years carrying out fieldwork and documenting an endangered Australian Aboriginal language called Wagiman. He received an MA in Linguistics and a PhD in Neuroscience from UCLA. In his dissertation work, he used functional neuroimaging to study the neural basis of speech perception and developed statistical methods to examine relationships between tissue damage and resulting behavioral deficits in aphasic stroke patients. Dr. Wilson is interested in the functional neuroanatomy of language and how language breaks down when its neural substrates are damaged. Since joining the Memory and Aging Center in 2007, he has studied patients with progressive non-fluent aphasia, semantic dementia and logopenic progressive aphasia using structural and functional imaging, along with behavioral measures that characterize language deficits. The goal of this research is to enable earlier and more accurate differential diagnoses. |
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