UCSF’s innovative, collaborative approach to patient care, research and education spans disciplines across the life sciences, making it a world leader in scientific discovery and its translation to improving health.
Liwen Zhang is a postdoctoral fellow in the Lee Dementia Imaging Genetics Lab. She received her PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Groningen in 2016. After that, she worked as a research fellow at the National University of Singapore and Duke-NUS Medical School jointly, where she worked on Alzheimer’s disease using neuroimaging methods.
Ms. Smith is the clinical research supervisor working directly with the Rabinovici Lab and the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. She works closely with both faculty and staff in monitoring operational issues, regulatory compliance and project development. Ms. Smith brings many years of experience in clinical and non-clinical trials across a variety of funding mechanisms and disciplines. Prior to coming to the Memory and Aging Center in April 2019, Ms.
Torie is a research associate in the Memory and Aging Center who manages the International NeuroHIV Cure Consortium imaging archive at UCSF. She is a recent graduate of the UCSF Masters of Science in Biomedical Imaging program, where she completed her thesis examining longitudinal changes in brain integrity during HIV using diffusion tensor imaging.
Matthew builds prognostic models using magnetic resonance imaging data to show brain atrophy patterns in patients with frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). He develops, maintains and improves end-to-end neuroimage processing pipelines to transform raw MRI scans into actionable feature vectors for machine learning models.
Dr. Staffaroni is a neuropsychologist and assistant professor at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center. He provides clinical neuropsychological assessments, and his research focuses on predicting disease progression and improving endpoints for clinical trials in neurodegenerative diseases. He obtained a PhD in Clinical Psychology at Palo Alto University, with an emphasis in neuropsychology. He completed a clinical internship at the West Los Angeles VA Health Care System and a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in neuropsychology at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center.
Dr. Suvi Hakkinen is a postdoctoral scholar in the Dementia Imaging Genetics Laboratory led by Dr. Suzee Lee. She received her PhD degree from the Department of Psychology and Logopedics at the University of Helsinki in 2018, where she completed her dissertation on the functional organization of the human auditory cortex during active auditory tasks. She joined the Memory and Aging Center in 2018 to deepen her understanding of various neuroimaging methods and their relevance to clinical research.
Tiffany Chow joined the Clinical Affective Neuroscience (CAN) Laboratory as a postdoctoral scholar in 2018. She received her PhD degree in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2017. Her graduate work assessed the neural correlates of episodic memory retrieval through the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging, transcranial direct current stimulation, and wearable camera technology.
Dr. Lorenzo Pasquini joined the Seeley lab in November 2016 as a postdoctoral fellow. He graduated in Neuroscience and Public Health at the Ludwig-Maximilan University of Munich. He obtained a PhD degree from the Technical University of Munich, where he worked under the mentorship of Dr. Christian Sorg at the Neuroimaging Center, studying large-scale brain network dysfunctions in Alzheimer’s disease, with a specific focus on multimodal neuroimaging and intrinsic activity of the medial temporal lobes.
Maria Luisa Mandelli leads the neuroimaging research within the language team of the Memory and Aging Center. Her research focuses on neuroanatomical changes caused by language and other neurodegenerative disorders. She has been working on brain magnetic resonance imaging for the past ten years, with the goal of better understanding of how the brain develops, changes over time, and how it makes us who we are.
