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. David N. Soleimani-Meigooni is a neurologist who cares for patients experiencing cognitive symptoms as a result of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease.
In research, Soleimani-Meigooni focuses on advancing precision-medicine approaches to diagnosing Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. He looks at using positron emission tomography (PET) to image amyloid-beta and tau (protein fragments that accumulate in the brains of people with the condition).
Dr. Spina received his medical degree from the University of Catania, Italy. He completed a neurology residency at the University of Siena, Italy from which he also obtained his doctorate degree on mechanisms of neurodegeneration. He was trained in neuropathology of dementia syndromes at the Indiana Alzheimer Disease Center, Indianapolis in the laboratory of Dr. Bernardino Ghetti. Later, he completed an internship in internal medicine and a neurology residency at Indiana University. Dr.
Dr. Staffaroni is a clinical neuropsychologist and Associate Professor at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center. His research focuses on improving early detection, prognosis, and monitoring of neurodegenerative diseases through a combination of clinical tests, neuroimaging, and blood-based biomarkers. He leads studies of remote digital data collection in frontotemporal dementia using smartphone assessments and sensor technologies.
Virginia Sturm, PhD, is the John Douglas French Alzheimer’s Foundation Endowed Professor at UCSF. She is a 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).
Dr. Tee is a neurologist from Taiwan and an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute. She completed her medical and master’s degrees at National Taiwan University and her residency at National Taiwan University Hospital and En-Chu-Kong Hospital. She co-directs the Chinese outreach effort at UCSF Memory and Aging Center.
Elena Tsoy was awarded her PhD degree in counseling psychology from the University of Massachusetts Boston. She completed her predoctoral internship in clinical psychology at Tewksbury State Hospital and her postdoctoral fellowship in neuropsychology at UCSF Memory and Aging Center.
Dr. Valcour is a Professor of Medicine with a shared appointment in the Division of Geriatric Medicine and the Department of Neurology. His work crosses disciplines to research and care for cognitive disorders in aging populations and to understand brain injury in the setting of HIV among all ages, including funded pediatric HIV studies. His clinical work involves consultations for patients with cognitive disorders at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center.
As an Assistant Professor of Neurology at UCSF, Dr. Lawren Vandevrede's overarching goal is to provide outstanding clinical care to patients with dementia and their caregivers. He completed his medical training in Chicago, where he also obtained a PhD degree in neuroscience working with his mentor to develop novel therapeutic agents for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.
Jet Vonk received her PhD degree in Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences from the City University of New York Graduate Center, with a focus on neurolinguistics and cognitive science. She also maintains an affiliation with the Department of Epidemiology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where she is currently obtaining a second PhD in Epidemiology.
Christine M. Walsh, PhD, received her BA degree in physiology from Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin in Ireland. Dr. Walsh did her doctoral work at the University of Michigan studying the effects of REM sleep modulation on learning and memory. She also studied the neural correlates of cognitive aging. In 2011 Dr. Walsh joined the UCSF Memory and Aging Center where she has been studying sleep in both healthy older adults and in individuals with neurodegenerative diseases. Dr. Walsh is particularly interested in the contribution of sleep disturbance to cognitive decline.
Charles Windon, MD, is an assistant professor of clinical neurology at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center. In this role, he participates in the clinical care of those with neurodegenerative disease and also participates in the research evaluations of those referred to the Memory and Aging Center with a multitude of neurological conditions. Charles is also involved in the community outreach program at the MAC, with a particular interest in outreach to underserved communities, especially the African American community within the San Francisco Bay Area.
