People

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.

Aja Powe

Assistant Clinical Research Coordinator

Caroline Prioleau

Writer & Designer

Caroline Prioleau writes and designs content for the Memory and Aging Center and the Global Brain Health Institute. She is interested in using design and technology to share complex information and facilitate collaborations across clinical, research and non-medical groups. She also co-leads an oral history project, hear/say, that focuses on collecting personal stories about the experience of aging, dementia and caregiving.

Igor Prufer queiroz campos araujo

Behavioral Neurology Clinical Fellow

Igor Prufer Q.C. Araujo obtained his MD degree at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He completed his neurology residency at Texas Tech University in Lubbock Texas being the chief resident in his final year of training. His current research interests include the benefits of multilingualism to cognitive reserve, the neural basis of decision making and socioeconomic factors affecting dementia care.

Stephanie Pun

Clinical Social Worker

Stephanie earned her master’s degree in social work from San Jose State University in 2019. Prior to joining the Memory and Aging Center, Stephanie was a social worker with the HUD-VASH program at the VA Medical Center where she worked with homeless veterans to address issues related to housing, mental health and substance use disorders.

Kyle Pusateri, MA, MPH

Chief Operations Officer, GBHI

Kyle Pusateri is the Chief Operations Officer at GBHI, where he oversees the complex administrative components of GBHI, helping to ensure that the Institute is able to fulfill its mission of reducing the scale and impact of dementia worldwide.

Ting Qi

Postdoctoral Fellow

Ting is a postodoctoral fellow in the ALBA Lab.

James Qian

Clinical Research Coordinator

James was born and raised in Beijing, China. He graduated from Westmont College in December 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. His senior capstone project explored the effects of mindfulness meditation on people with mild cognitive impairment. 

After graduation, he worked as a program specialist at Friendship Center Adult Day Services in Santa Barbara, where he organized and led memory-strengthening activities for older adults with dementia.

Gil Rabinovici, MD

Professor

Dr. Rabinovici is the Edward Fein and Pearl Landrith Endowed Professor in Memory & Aging. He received his BS degree from Stanford University and MD from Northwestern University Medical School. He completed an internship in internal medicine at Stanford University, neurology residency (and chief residency) at UCSF and a behavioral neurology fellowship at the Memory and Aging Center (MAC).

Kamalini Ranasinghe, MBBS, PhD

Assistant Professor

Dr. Kamalini Ranasinghe received her medical degree from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka and completed her internship training in general medicine and general surgery. She earned her doctorate degree in Cognition and Neuroscience from the University of Texas at Dallas, under the mentorship of Dr. Michael Kilgard.

Katherine Rankin, PhD

Professor & Neuropsychologist

Dr. Kate Rankin is a professor in the UCSF Department of Neurology who specializes in the neuropsychological, neuroanatomic and genetic underpinnings of human socioemotional behavior in healthy aging and neurodegenerative disease. She studied psychology at Yale for her undergraduate work and received graduate degrees from Fuller School of Psychology in Pasadena, including her PhD degree in clinical psychology and a master’s degree in theology.

Buddhika Ratnasiri

Clinical Research Coordinator

Buddhika began working at the Memory and Aging Center as an Assistant Clinical Research Coordinator with the ALBA Language Neurobiology Lab, shortly after graduating with a degree in Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2020. He helps coordinate the Project Programs Grant, a longitudinal study collecting behavioral and brain imaging measures on patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA).

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