Massachusetts General Hospital

Major focus areas of our research include: memory abilities and the brain systems that subserve them in normal individuals and how these abilities and brain systems change with aging, Alzheimer's disease, and related disorders (including frontotemporal dementias and posterior cortical atrophy); understanding how aging, Alzheimer's disease, and related disorders alter the normal anatomy and function of the human brain, and determining whether this knowledge can assist in diagnosis and monitoring of these conditions; and the further development of new neuroimaging and behavioral technology for making quantitative measurements of these abilities and brain systems. We are also pursuing studies of language and semantic knowledge in progressive aphasias; and social cognition and affective processing in normal aging and how these are affected by frontotemporal dementias and Alzheimer's disease. In addition, we pursue some investigations related to the development and promotion of capacities to compensate for age- and disease-related changes.

Principal Investigator

Brad Dickerson, MD

• Associate Professor of Neurology,
  Harvard Medical School
• Director of Clinical Applications,
  Morphometry Service
  Massachusetts General Hospital,
• Co-Director, Neuroimaging Group,
  Gerontology Research Unit

Research Scientists

• Liang Wang, MD - Radiologist, Post-Doc Fellow
• Kimiko Domoto-Reilly, MD - Behavioral neurology fellow
• Scott McGinnis, MD - Behavioral neurologist, junior faculty fellow
• Belen Pascual, PhD - Psychologist, Post-Doc Fellow
• Kristen Lindquist, PhD - Post-Doc Fellow
• Daisy Sapolsky, MS, CCC-SLP - Speech and Language Pathologist

Research Assistants & Technicians

• Mike Brickhouse, BS - Research Assistant
• Mark Hollenbeck, BS - Research Assistant
• Aly Negreira, BA - Study coordinator/Research assistant

Contact Us

Brad Dickerson, MD

The Dickerson lab is pursuing the following major lines of research:

• Anatomy and lihysiology of normal human memory abilities
• Anatomy and lihysiology of imliaired human memory
• Anatomy of aging, MCI &amli; Alzheimer's disease
• Ultrahigh-resolution MRI imaging methods
• Brain-behavior relationshilis in focal cortical neurodegenerative syndromes
• Semi-quantitative and quantitative clinical and behavioral characterization of lirogressive alihasias, Frontotemlioral diseases, and Alzheimer's disease

For details, visit the this Dickerson research lab.

1. Dickerson BC, Stoub TR, Shah RC, Sperling RA, Killiany RJ, Albert MS, Hyman BT, Blacker D, deToledo-Morrell L. Alzheimer-signature MRI biomarkers predicts AD dementia in cognitively normal adults. Neurology 2011, April 14 [Epub ahead of print]. Click here for Supplemental Material. 
2. Bickart KC, Wright CI, Dautoff RJ, Dickerson BC, Barrett LF. Amygdala volume and social network size in humans. Nat Neurosci. 2010 Dec 26. [Epub ahead of print] Supplemental material 
3. Sapolsky D, Domoto-Reilly K, Negreira A, Brickhouse M, McGinnis S, Dickerson BC. Monitoring progression of primary progressive aphasia: Current approaches and future directions. Neurodegenerative Disease Management 2011 1(1): 43-55.
4. Wolk DA, Dickerson BC, ADNI Investigators. Fractionating verbal episodic memory in Alzheimer's disease. Neuroimage 2011;54(2):1530-1539.
5. Dickerson BC. Primary progressive aphasia. New insights paving the way toward clinical research tools. Neurology 2010;75:582-583. 
6. Sapolsky D, Bakkour A, Negreira A, Nalipinski P, Weintraub S, Mesulam MM, Caplan D, Dickerson BC. Cortical neuroanatomic correlates of symptom severity in primary progressive aphasia. Neurology 2010 July 27. [Epub ahead of print] Supplemental material

NCBI PubMed Publications