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.
Miranda was born and raised in Palo Alto, California and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2020 with a bachelor of arts degree in molecular and cell biology. At the Memory and Aging Center, she is working as a clinical research coordinator in the Rabinovici Lab to help coordinate studies examining the utility of innovative neuroimaging techniques and other biomarkers for the improved diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.
Ranjani graduated from the University of California, San Diego with a bachelor’s degree in cognitive science specializing in Clinical Aspects of Cognition. She is extremely interested in and passionate about neurodegenerative disease research, especially Alzheimer’s disease. She now works at the Memory and Aging Center in Dr. Rabinovici’s In Vivo Molecular Neuroimaging Lab.
Morgan is a clinical research coordinator in the Rosen Lab who works on the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), Longitudinal Early-Onset Alzheimer’s Disease Study (LEADS) and UCSF Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) studies.
Liwen Zhang is a postdoctoral fellow in the Lee Dementia Imaging Genetics Lab. She received her PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Groningen in 2016. After that, she worked as a research fellow at the National University of Singapore and Duke-NUS Medical School jointly, where she worked on Alzheimer’s disease using neuroimaging methods.
Ms. Smith is the clinical research supervisor working directly with the Rabinovici Lab and the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. She works closely with both faculty and staff in monitoring operational issues, regulatory compliance and project development. Ms. Smith brings many years of experience in clinical and non-clinical trials across a variety of funding mechanisms and disciplines. Prior to coming to the Memory and Aging Center in April 2019, Ms.
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.
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.
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.
