Michael Geschwind, MD, PhD
Dr. Geschwind received his MD and PhD degrees in neuroscience through the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. He completed his internship in internal medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Medical Center, his neurology residency at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore and his fellowship in behavioral neurology at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center (MAC). He is a Professor of Neurology at the MAC.
Dr. Geschwind evaluates new patients in the MAC clinic and participates in the continued management and care for these patients in the continuity clinic. He is active in the training of medical students, residents and neurobehavior and other fellows at UCSF. Dr. Geschwind teaches national courses, and lectures both nationally and internationally, on dementia including rapidly progressive dementias, such as prion diseases and antibody-mediated dementias. He has been a guest editor for the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) Continuum Dementia edition and has contributed to editions on dementia and infectious disease. He also served on the AAN’s committee for dementia criteria.
Dr. Geschwind’s primary research interest is the assessment, management and treatment of rapidly progressive dementias, including prion diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) and antibody-mediated encephalopathies. Dr. Geschwind helped establish a program for the assessment of rapidly progressive dementias at UCSF, the first of its kind in the country. He helped to run the first U.S. treatment study for CJD. He also has an active clinical and research interest in movement disorders, such as Huntington’s disease, spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA), multiple system atrophy (MSA), corticobasal degeneration (CBD), progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), other parkinsonian dementias and neurogenetic disorders. Dr. Geschwind is also very interested in adult-onset leukoencephalopathies, including the neurogenetic disorder Cerebral Autosomal Dominant Arteriopathy Subcortical Infarcts and Leukoencephalopathy (CADASIL). He also was the site investigator for a treatment trial for patients with CADASIL and follows a large cohort of patients with CADASIL.
Dr. Geschwind also directs (with his colleague Dr. Alexandra Nelson) the MAC Huntington’s Disease (HD) Center, which has been designated a Huntington’s Disease Society of America Center of Excellence. He is an active investigator for several HD, SCA and MSA observational and/or interventional studies. He co-directs the UCSF MAC Autoimmune Encephalopathy Clinic in which patients with suspected or known antibody-mediated encephalopathies are evaluated and managed.