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.
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 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).
Motivated after helping to care for a family member with Alzheimer’s disease, Jeremy studied neuroscience at the University of Southern California as an undergraduate. He then obtained his medical degree and a master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins. There he was involved in dementia care coordination and Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis research, and he completed the Sommer Scholar public health leadership program. He subsequently completed neurology residency training at UCSF, during which he joined Dr.
Jack Taylor is an Assistant Clinical Research Coordinator in the Boxer Lab of the Memory and Aging Center, focused on piloting and implementing smartphone-based cognitive assessments into ALLFTD (the ARTFL-LEFFTDS Longitudinal Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration multisite research consortium).
Marie Edouard Theodore is the Fellowship Experience Manager at the Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI) based at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and Trinity College Dublin. In this role, she supports the Atlantic Fellows for Equity in Brain Health and collaborates with the faculty and staff in achieving the common goal of diminishing the scale and impact of dementia worldwide. She also serves on the Black Leadership Advisory Council (BLAC) at the Memory and Aging Center.
Dr. Theofilas is Assistant Professor at the Memory and Aging Center, UCSF. He obtained his bachelor and masters’ degrees in Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and his doctorate at the University of Bonn, Germany, studying apoptosis signaling pathways, mitochondria dysfunction and excitotoxicity in animal models of epilepsy.
Lies works with the clinical trials team led by Dr. Adam Boxer. She develops assays and sample analyses of fluid-based biomarkers for neurodegenerative diseases with the aim to evaluate therapeutic response in clinical trials.
Gianina Toller is a postdoctoral fellow from Switzerland, now working with the Social Function team led Dr. Kate Rankin. Dr. Toller completed her PhD degree in 2015 at the Swiss Epilepsy Center and the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Her thesis investigated the functional and structural correlates of socioemotional dysfunction in patients with refractory mesial temporal lobe epilepsy, and in patients with a very rare genetic disorder called Urbach-Wiethe disease.
Charlie Toohey is the Manager of Technology and Data Management at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center. He is the senior software architect for the LAVA Clinical Research Management System, a comprehensive database of patient assessment, laboratory and diagnostic data which supports many inter-related research protocols. LAVA source code is available on GitHub in the “lava” repository.
