Leadership

As a Professor in the UCSF Department of Neurology and a John Douglas French Foundation Endowed Professor, Dr. Kao oversees her lab at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center. She has expertise in biochemistry, cell biology, molecular neuroscience, and the biology of aging. She has additional training in kinase signaling cascades, membrane trafficking and genetics of neurodegenerative disease. She directs the UCSF Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP). She has received the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation Distinguished Investigator Award in Neurodegenerative Diseases, the Glenn Award for Research in the Biological Mechanisms of Aging and the Derek Denny-Brown Young Neurological Scholar Award.

Dr. Yokoyama is an Associate Professor in the UCSF Department of Neurology and in Radiology & Biomedical Imaging, and a Mary Oakley Foundation Endowed Professor in Neurodegeneration. She has expertise in neurogenetics, genomics, transcriptomics, neuroimaging, statistics, bioinformatics, and clinical research of neurodegenerative disease. In addition, Dr. Yokoyama co-directs the UCSF Alzheimer Disease Research Center’s (ADRC) Biomarker Core and is a faculty member in the Global Brain Health Institute. Dr. Yokoyama was recognized for her role in mentoring by receiving the inaugural Alzheimer’s Association Excellence in Neuroscience Mentoring Award.

Dr. Agard is a Professor in the UCSF Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics and Pharmaceutical Chemistry. He was the founding Director of the California Institute for Bioengineering, Biotechnology and Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3) and has been instrumental in developing methods for SAXS, 3D deconvolution, structured illumination light microscopies, and automated cryo-electron tomography, among others. His work has been recognized by the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Gennatas is an Assistant Professor in the UCSF Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. He is also a member of the Science and Technology Pillar of the Center for Intelligent Imaging at the UCSF Department of Radiology. He co-developed five novel machine learning algorithms and have built a comprehensive machine learning platform which is used for algorithm research, applied data analysis, and teaching. He serves as a mentor to researchers and clinicians on machine learning methods for biomedical data analysis.

Dr. Karch is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University in St Louis (WashU). She established a cell bank of fibroblasts, iPSCs, and genome edited iPSC lines from deeply clinically phenotyped and genetically defined aged cohorts. Dr. Karch serves as the Associate Director for the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network, the Biomarker Core leader of the Knight ADRC at WashU, an investigator with the Tau Consortium and the Chan Zuckerberg Neurodegenerative Challenge Network. She has received the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer’s Disease (DIAD) Young Investigator Award.