faculty

Marilu Gorno Tempini, MD, PhD

Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry

Dr. Maria Luisa Gorno Tempini is a behavioral neurologist and holds the Charles Schwab Charles Schwab Distinguished Professorship in Dyslexia and Neurodevelopment. She currently directs the Language Neurobiology Laboratory at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and co-directs the UCSF Dyslexia Center. She obtained her medical degree and clinical neurology specialty training in Italy and has a doctorate in the neuroimaging of language from University College London.

Katherine Possin, PhD

John Douglas French Alzheimer’s Foundation Endowed Professorship
Professor

Dr. Possin’s research program is focused on improving the detection, diagnosis and care for people with neurodegenerative disease. She has long-standing interests in understanding the cognitive impairments and their neural bases in neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s disease, Lewy body disease, Huntington’s disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy and frontotemporal lobar degeneration.

Aimee Kao, MD, PhD

John Douglas French Foundation Endowed Professor

Aimee Kao, MD, PhD, is a Professor of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco and the John Douglas French Foundation Endowed Professor. She leads an NIH-supported Tau Center Without Walls and directs the UCSF Tau Consortium Human Fibroblast Bank. Dr.

Zachary Miller, MD

Associate Professor

Dr. Zachary Miller grew up in the Washington DC metro area. He obtained an undergraduate degree double majoring in Molecular Biology and Fine Arts from Haverford College. Following this he spent two years as a research assistant at MIT’s Whitehead Institutes for Biomedical Research in Dr. Harvey Lodish’s lab. He received his medical degree from the University of Pittsburgh and pursued medical internship as well as neurology residency training at the University of Washington.

Suzee Lee, MD

Professor

Dr. Suzee Lee is a Professor of Neurology, the Director of the Dementia Imaging Genetics Lab, and the Director of the Visiting Scholars Program at the UCSF Weill Institute of Neuroscience’s Memory and Aging Center. Dr. Lee is a behavioral neurologist who received a BA degree in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard College and an MD degree from the McGill Faculty of Medicine.

Winston Chiong, MD, PhD

Associate Professor of Neurology
Executive Director, UCSF Bioethics

Winston Chiong is an Associate Professor in the UCSF Department of Neurology Memory and Aging Center and is the principal investigator of the UCSF Decision Lab. His clinical practice focuses on Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia and other cognitive disorders of aging. His research has two main themes:

Michael Geschwind, MD, PhD

Professor

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.

Christa Pereira, PsyD

Assistant Professor

Dr. Watson graduated from the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology-Stanford PsyD Consortium in 2014. She has a background in psychology, developmental biology, neuroimaging and neuropsychology. Her research interests include brain development across the lifespan and, in particular, in the neuroscience of typical and atypical learning. She is currently working in the ALBA Language Neurobiology Lab with Dr. Maria Luisa Gorno Tempini.

Virginia Sturm, PhD

Associate Professor

Virginia Sturm, PhD, is the John Douglas French Alzheimer’s Foundation Endowed Professor at UCSF. She is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and she is the director of the Clinical Affective Neuroscience (CAN) Laboratory that is located in the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and affiliated with the UCSF Center for Psychophysiology and Behavior (CPB).

Bill Seeley, MD

Professor

Dr. Seeley attended medical school at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine, where he first encountered patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in 1999, during a research elective with Dr. Bruce Miller. He completed a neurology residency at Harvard Medical School, training at the Massachusetts General and Brigham & Women's Hospitals. Returning to UCSF for a Behavioral Neurology fellowship, Dr.

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