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.
Renaud La Joie originally studied medicine in his native Normandy before graduating with a master’s degree in neuroscience from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. He then pursued a PhD degree in neuropsychology with Gael Chételat and Béatrice Desgranges, where he studied Alzheimer's disease using multimodal PET and MRI imaging. Dr. La Joie then spent a year with Dr. William Jagust at the University of California, Berkeley before joining Dr. Gil Rabinovici’s lab at the Memory and Aging Center in March 2016.
Dr. Serggio Lanata was raised in Peru, where he began his undergraduate studies in general science. He later earned a bachelor of science degree from the University of Florida. He obtained his medical degree from the University of South Florida and then completed his medicine internship and neurology residency at Brown University. He joined the UCSF Memory and Aging Center in 2013 as a Clinical Instructor and Behavioral Neurology Fellow.
Dr. Suzee Lee is an Associate Professor of Neurology, the Director of the Dementia Imaging Genetics Lab, and the Director of the Visiting Scholars Program at the UCSF Weill Institute of Neuroscience’s Memory and Aging Center. Dr. Lee is a behavioral neurologist who received a BA degree in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard College and an MD degree from the McGill Faculty of Medicine.
Dr. Peter A. Ljubenkov is a behavioral neurologist at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and specializes in caring for patients experiencing memory, language and behavioral changes due to neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Lewy body dementia, and other causes of dementia.
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.
Dr. Zachary Miller grew up in the Washington DC metro area. He obtained an undergraduate degree double majoring in Molecular Biology and Fine Arts from Haverford College. Following this he spent two years as a research assistant at MIT’s Whitehead Institutes for Biomedical Research in Dr. Harvey Lodish’s lab. He received his medical degree from the University of Pittsburgh and pursued medical internship as well as neurology residency training at the University of Washington.
Bruce L. Miller, MD, holds the A.W. and Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professorship in Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, directs the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and is the founding director of the Global Brain Health Institute at UCSF. In addition, he helps lead the Tau Consortium and The Bluefield Foundation, precision medicine collaborations focused on developing treatments for tauopathies and progranulin-mediated forms of frontotemporal dementia.
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. She is currently working on dyslexia in the ALBA Language Neurobiology Lab and a pediatric HIV brain imaging study with Dr. Victor Valcour.
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. 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).
