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.
Aimee Kao, MD, PhD, is a Professor of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco and the John Douglas French Foundation Endowed Professor. She leads an NIH-supported Tau Center Without Walls and directs the UCSF Tau Consortium Human Fibroblast Bank. Dr.
Dr. Kramer is a Professor of Neuropsychology in Neurology, the Director of the Memory and Aging Center Neuropsychology program, and the John Douglas French Alzheimer’s Foundation Endowed Professor at UCSF. He earned his doctorate in psychology at Baylor University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in neuropsychology at the Martinez VA hospital. Dr. Kramer is board certified in clinical neuropsychology.
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.
Courtney studied biological engineering and biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She then completed her MD/PhD at UT Southwestern. She trained with Dr. Joachim Herz studying ApoE receptor signaling in transgenic mouse models of Alzheimer's disease. She identified a role for reelin, a protein that is vital for brain development, in protecting older rodents against amyloid beta, one of the primary pathology proteins that accumulate in Alzheimer's disease.
Dr. Suzee Lee is a 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.
Emily Paolillo, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center. She obtained her PhD degree in Clinical Psychology (emphasis in Neuropsychology) from the SDSU/UCSD Joint Doctoral Program in 2021, which included a predoctoral clinical internship at VA Palo Alto Health Care System. Her research interests include evaluating digital health tools for early detection and monitoring of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.
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.
