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.
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.
Dr. Perry graduated from medical school at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He completed an internship in internal medicine and residency in neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota where he also researched obsessive-compulsive features in dementia. He is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at the Memory and Aging Center and participates in the evaluation and treatment of patients in the MAC clinic.
His current area of research interest is the impact of neurodegenerative illness on reward processing.
Pedro Pinheiro-Chagas, PhD, studies the neural architecture and dynamics of human intelligence, focusing on symbolic cognitive systems, such as mathematics and language. His research program aims at understanding how these systems develop and decline and how we can help.
Dr. Gil Rabinovici holds the Edward and Pearl Fein Distinguished Professorship in Memory & Aging in the UCSF Department of Neurology. He received his BS degree from Stanford University and MD from Northwestern University Medical School. He completed his neurology residency (and chief residency) at UCSF and a behavioral neurology fellowship at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center (MAC), where he cares for patients with cognitive disorders.
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.
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.
Julio Rojas is a neurologist who specializes in dementia, caring for patients with cognitive difficulties or behavioral changes resulting from conditions including Alzheimer’s disease, Lewy body dementia (a form of dementia that causes cognitive defects and Parkinson’s-like symptoms), frontotemporal dementia (a common cause of dementia in younger adults that features behavioral changes) and progressive supranuclear pa
Dr. Rosen is a behavioral neurologist and holds the Dorothy Kirsten French Foundation Endowed Professorship for Parkinsonian and Other Neurodegenerative Disorders. He received his medical degree from Boston University School of Medicine, trained in internal medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and subsequently completed a neurology residency at UCSF. After residency, Dr. Rosen pursued fellowship training in brain imaging at the Washington University School of Medicine, and then returned to UCSF to join the team at the Memory and Aging Center (MAC) in 1999.
Dr. Saloner is a scientist-practitioner and Assistant Professor at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center. His research integrates deep molecular screening tools, including large-scale proteomics platforms and targeted biomarker assays, with longitudinal clinical phenotyping to discover molecular pathways and biomarker candidates that drive the earliest clinical manifestations of neurodegenerative disease. Dr.
Dr. Sampognaro majored in neurobiology as an undergrad at Georgetown University. There, he worked as a research assistant in the laboratory of Maria Donoghue, studying the molecular underpinnings of Eph/ephrin signaling and its role in cortical neuronal development. After college, he matriculated to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he earned his MD and worked part-time in Charlotte Sumner’s laboratory, quantifying the degree of SMN1 insufficiency in humans with spinal muscular atrophy.
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.
