William Jagust MD

Dr. William Jagust is a Professor of Public Health and Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Faculty Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

His career has entailed the use of multiple imaging modalities to understand brain aging, Alzheimer’s disease, and the borderland of these two processes. His work pioneered in the study of glucose metabolism in brain aging and dementia, and he was among the earliest investigators to use MRI to measure structural brain alterations. Most recently his laboratory is engaged in studies that have used PET to examine the deposition of the aggregated proteins beta-amyloid and tau in aging and Alzheimer’s disease. These studies combine PET with structural and functional MRI, thus employing multimodal approaches to chart the course of normal brain aging and to differentiate it from preclinical Alzheimer’s disease. Research in his laboratory has defined the pattern of beta-amyloid deposition, its relationship to tau, and the effects of both tau and beta-amyloid on brain activity during memory encoding. In addition to research in his own laboratory, Dr. Jagust currently heads the PET Core of the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, a 60-center multisite study of imaging in AD. He is a recipient of the 2013 Potamkin Prize for Research in Pick’s, Alzheimer’s and Related Diseases.