Zoe Arvanitakis

Dr. Arvanitakis serves as MPI of the NIH-funded U24 ReCARDO project. She is a board-certified neurologist and the Medical Director of the Rush Memory Clinic at the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center (RADC), Professor and Head (Cognitive Neuroscience) in the Department of Neurological Sciences, and Chair of the University Council of Rush University, at Rush University Medical Center (RUMC), Chicago, IL, USA. A Medical Doctor (MD), she furthered her education with a behavioral neurology/dementia fellowship (Mayo Clinic) and a Master of Science (MS) in Clinical Research with concentration in Epidemiology (Graduate College, RUMC). She more recently completed an Executive MBA program, with specialization in strategic leadership. She is a highly-skilled professional expert, with broad and deep experience spanning the four academic medical pillars of 1) administrative leadership: with more than a decade leading in a complex and rapidly changing health care environment, including as a leader of NIH-funded awards, a departmental chair, and university leader on executive committees; 2) research: on the aging human brain, and cognitive dysfunction and dementia in particular, with a focus on translational and clinical research, including biologic mechanisms of disease, clinical trials, and community-based research; 3) education and mentoring: in neuroscience and biomedical research more generally, including for trainees and faculty of all levels, and across the USA; and 4) clinical care: as a cognitive/dementia subspecialist in neurology, for a range of memory and cognitive disorders during the adult lifespan. Fields of work span cognitive and behavioral neurology, cognitive impairment and dementia, neurodegeneration, Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders, cerebrovascular disease and vascular contributions to cognitive impairment and dementia, and vascular-metabolic conditions such as diabetes in relation to brain aging. Using large, prospective longitudinal clinical-pathological data from the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center community-based cohorts, Dr. Arvanitakis leads NIH-grants and peer-reviewed publications, leveraging clinical, laboratory, neuroimaging, multi–omics and other data, as well as human biospecimens and postmortem brain data. Dr. Arvanitakis serves on numerous national and international funding agency review panels such as on NIH study sections, as well as on scientific journal and meeting abstract review panels. She is a past Chair of the Geriatric Neurology Section of the American Academy of Neurology, and serves as a Specialty Chief Editor for the international journal Frontiers in Dementia.