Awards Winners at AAIC 2012

2012 Henry Wisniewski Lifetime Achievement Award

Bradley T. Hyman, M.D., Ph.D.
Director, Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital
John B. Penney, Jr. Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School

Bradley T. Hyman, M.D., Ph.D., is the John B. Penney, Jr. Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital where he has a clinical practice in the Memory and Disorder Unit and is the director of the Massachusetts Alzheimer Disease Research Center. 

His clinical career is devoted towards the care of patients with dementia. His laboratory is pursuing research in Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases with a goal of understanding the neuropathophysiologic and genetic factors that underlie dementia.

Dr. Hyman's laboratory is developing methods to examine clinical-pathological correlates and biomarkers in AD, as well as animal and cell models to explore the natural history of the diseases.  A recent focus has been the use of advanced microscopy methods — including multiphoton microscopy for in vivo imaging of plaques, tangles and synuclein aggregates, as well as FRET methods to detect protein-protein interactions and protein conformation.   

Dr. Hyman received a B.A. in chemistry from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in biochemistry and M.D. from the University of Iowa, where he also did his residency in neurology and fellowships in behavioral neurology and neuropathology. He joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School in 1989. Dr. Hyman has received the Potamkin Award, a Metropolitan Life Award, a Brookdale Foundation Fellowship, an Alzheimer's Association Faculty Scholar Award, an Alzheimer's Association Pioneer Award and a National Institute on Aging Merit Award.

2012 Khalid Iqbal Lifetime Achievement Award

Lennart Mucke, M.D.
Dr. Mucke is the director of the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease. He is also the Joseph B. Martin Distinguished Professor­ of Neuroscience and a professor of neurol­ogy at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He has joint appointments in UCSF's Neuroscience, Biomedical Sciences and Medical Scientist (M.D./Ph.D.) Graduate Training Programs and teaches as an attending physician in neurology at San Francisco General Hospital.

Dr. Mucke is a graduate of the Georg-August University (magna cum laude) and the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (neurobiology) in Göttingen, Germany. He trained in internal medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, in neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and in neuroimmunology and neurovirology at the Scripps Research Institute, where he was subsequently appointed to the faculty. He was recruited to the Gladstone Institutes and UCSF in 1996.

Dr. Mucke's research focuses on processes that result in memory loss and other major neurological deficits, with an emphasis on Alzheimer's disease and related disorders. He has generated informative experimental models of these conditions and used them to identify novel strategies to prevent neuro­logical decline. As the founding director of the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease, he has created a leading program for research and training in disease-focused neuroscience.

Dr. Mucke is a member of the American Neurological Association, the Association of American Physicians and the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives. He serves on the National Advisory Council on Aging for the National Institutes of Health and the Senate of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases.

Dr. Mucke has received a number of awards for his accomplishments, including the Potamkin Prize from the American Academy of Neurology, the Zenith Award from the Alzheimer's Association, the MetLife Foundation Award for Medical Research, a MERIT Award from the NIH and an Award for Excellence in Direct Teaching and Mentor­ing from the Haile T. Debas Academy of Medical Educators.

2012 Bengt Winblad Lifetime Achievement Award

 

Monique M.B. Breteler, M.D., Ph.D.
Monique Breteler is the director of Population Health Sciences at the German Center for Neurologic diseases (DZNE) in Bonn and professor of Population Health Sciences at the University Bonn, Germany. She also is professor of epidemiology (adjunct) at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. She obtained her M.D. in 1987 from the University of Nijmegen and her Ph.D. in 1993 from Erasmus University, Rotterdam, both in the Netherlands. She joined the Department of Epidemiology at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 1989 to develop the neurologic component in the Rotterdam Study, a large prospective cohort study on chronic diseases in the elderly that was being planned. Until 2011, she worked at Erasmus University Rotterdam where she was the primary investigator for neurological diseases of the Rotterdam Study and founded the Rotterdam Scan Study, both internationally leading population studies in the area of neurodegenerative diseases.

During the past decades, Dr Breteler's research focused on the etiology and preclinical detection of neurodegenerative and cerebrovascular diseases, including dementia (in particular Alzheimer's disease), Parkinson's disease, cerebral small vessel disease and ischemic stroke. In the early 1990s she was one of the first epidemiologists to challenge the strict clinical distinction between Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia and to incorporate brain imaging in population based studies. Since then she has focused on the quantification and elucidation of the role of vascular factors and lifestyle factors in the etiology of dementia.

In Bonn she is establishing the Rhineland Study, a prospective cohort study of 30,000 individuals that aims to identify causes and preclinical multimodal biomarker profiles of neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases and to investigate normal and pathological brain structure and function during the adult life course.

2012 Zaven Khachaturian Award at AAIC

 

Ronald C. Petersen, Ph.D., M.D.

Professor of Neurology
Cora Kanow Professor of Alzheimer's Disease Research
Director, Mayo Alzheimer's Disease Research Center
Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, MN

Ronald C. Petersen, M.D., Ph.D., received a Ph.D. degree in experimental psychology from the University of Minnesota and served as a research psychologist at the U.S. Army Biomedical Research Laboratory in Edgewood, Maryland, United States. He graduated from Mayo Medical School and completed an internship in medicine at Stanford University Medical Center. He returned to Mayo Clinic to complete a residency in neurology, which was followed by a fellowship in behavioral neurology at Harvard University Medical School/Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. Petersen joined the staff of Mayo Clinic in 1986. He holds the academic rank of professor of neurology and is recognized with the distinction of a named professorship, the Cora Kanow Professorship in Alzheimer'sDisease Research. In 2011, he was designated as a Mayo Clinic Distinguished Investigator.

Dr. Petersen is currently the Chester and Debbie Cadieux director of the Mayo Clinic Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, the director of the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging and serves as associate medical director in the Department of Development at Mayo. He has authored more than 400 peer-reviewed articles on memory disorders, aging and Alzheimer's disease and has edited four books: 1) Memory Disorders, 2) Mayo Clinic on Alzheimer's Disease, 3) Mild Cognitive Impairment: Aging to Alzheimer's Disease and 4) Mayo Clinic Guide to Alzheimer's Disease. He has served on numerous advisory boards for the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and the National Institutes of Health. He is currently the immediate past chair of the Medical and Scientific Advisory Council of the national Alzheimer's Association and serves on the National Advisory Council on Aging at the National Institute on Aging.  He was recently appointed chair of the Advisory Council on Research, Care and Services for the National Alzheimer's Project Act by the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. Petersen is a recipient of the 2004 MetLife Award for Medical Research in Alzheimer's Disease, the 2004 Ronald and Nancy Reagan Institute Award for Research in Alzheimer's Disease of the Alzheimer's Association, the 2005 Potamkin Prize for Research in Pick's, Alzheimer's and Related Disorders of the American Academy of Neurology and the inaugural Leon Thal Prize of the Lou Ruvo Brain Institute in 2007. His current research focuses on the study of normal aging, mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease.

de Leon Prize in Neuroimaging

Presented by the ISTAART Neuroimaging Professional Interest Area.

The 2012 winner is Gael Chételat for her paper entitled "Accelerated cortical atrophy in cognitively normal elderly with high β-amyloid deposition."

Dr. Chétalat is responsible for a research team in the Inserm Unit U923 at the Cyceron PET Center in Caen. She has been working for more than 10 years on normal and pathological aging, especially on Alzheimer's disease, using different neuroimaging techniques (structural and functional MRI, FDG-PET, PiB-PET).

Dr. Chételat performed her studies at the University of Lyon in France and in Montreal, Canada, before obtaining her Ph.D. in 2002. After a one-year post-doc position in Geneva, Switzerland, she joined the Cyceron PET Center U923 Unit in Caen and obtained a permanent position as a researcher at the Inserm French National Research Institute. Recently, she spent a two-year sabbatical (2008-2010) in the Nuclear Medicine Department of the Austin Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, working with Christopher Rowe and Victor Villemagne on amyloid neuroimaging in Alzheimer's disease with recently developed PET markers. From 2007 in Caen, Gael Chételat initiated a large multimodal neuroimaging project called IMAP focusing on early diagnosis and monitoring of Alzheimer's disease. This research program has been funded in 2008 by the ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) and progressively enlarged in terms of joining collaborators and studied populations.

Alzheimer's Association 2012 de Leon Prize – New Investigator category

This year's winner is Dr. Mohammad Arfan Ikram for his paper entitled "Common variants at 12q14 and 12q24 are associated with hippocampal volume."

Dr. Ikram, M.D. Ph.D., has recently been appointed assistant professor and head of neuroepidemiologic research at the department of Epidemiology, Erasmus MC Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He also carries affiliations with the departments of Radiology and Neurology. He is principal investigator of neurologic diseases in the Rotterdam Study and principal investigator of the Rotterdam Scan Study.

His research focuses on investigating the etiology of neurologic diseases in the elderly, with a particular focus on dementia, Alzheimer's disease, stroke and Parkinson disease. His main area of research is to elucidate the earliest signs of brain diseases, before clinical symptoms are present, and to understand how these lead to clinical manifestation of disease. Moreover, he is interested in preclinical signs that can be used to identify persons at highest risk of developing disease. To that aim he has used data from the large population-based Rotterdam Study and Rotterdam Scan Study that have followed nearly 15,000 persons for a period of more than 20 years.

In his research he has used neuropsychological testing, advanced neuroimaging techniques, genome-wide and sequencing technology and recently electronic gait assessments. Not only is he interested in how these pre-clinical markers lead to clinical disease, he also wants to disentangle the intricate relationships across and between these markers.

Dr. Ikram's research is supported by grants from the Netherlands Heart Foundation, International Parkinson Fonds, Dutch Brain Foundation, Netherlands Consortium for Healthy Aging and the Erasmus MC Rotterdam.