Winston Chiong, MD, PhD
Winston Chiong is the Mary Oakley Foundation Professor of Neuroethics in the UCSF Department of Neurology Memory and Aging Center and principal investigator of the UCSF Decision Lab. His clinical practice focuses on Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, and other cognitive disorders of aging.
Dr. Chiong’s research centers on two main areas:
- The neural basis of decision-making in the aging brain—examining how brain systems involved in financial and medical decisions are affected by health and disease.
- The ethical, policy, and health equity implications of alterations to brain function, informed by the experiences of patients with brain diseases and individuals undergoing new brain-based therapies.
He serves as director of UCSF Bioethics and is a member of the UCSF Medical Center Ethics Committee. He is also a member of the Neuroethics Working Group for the National Institutes of Health BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Multi-Council Working Group and sits on the Board of Directors for the International Neuroethics Society.
Dr. Chiong’s work is informed by his interdisciplinary training in clinical medicine, philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience. He earned his PhD degree in philosophy from New York University and his MD from UCSF. He completed an internship in internal medicine at Stanford University, followed by neurology residency training at UCSF. He later pursued postdoctoral research training in cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging at UC Berkeley, as well as clinical training in dementia at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center.
