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Matthew Lieberman, Ph.D.

Faculty Member

Professor
Department of Psychology
University of California, Los Angeles

Personal Statement

My research applies a social cognitive neuroscience approach to examine questions of social and self-understanding, of social pains and pleasures, the social propagation of persuasive information, and of self-control and emotion regulation.  Our work uses a variety of approaches including functional magnetic imaging (fMRI), functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) that allows for up to 6 people to be scanned simultaneously while interacting, and electrocorticography (ECoG).   This work has been funded by NIMH, NIA, NSF, DARPA, DOD, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.  Based on the fact that my lab has published a significant portion of the fMRI work done on implicit emotion regulation, I believe I am well-qualified to serve as a co-I for this proposal.

Satpute headshot

Ajay B Satpute, Ph.D.

Faculty Member

Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
University of California, Los Angeles

Personal Statement

Ajay B. Satpute received his doctorate in psychology from UCLA and completed postdoctoral training at Columbia University. His research in social and affective neuroscience combines multimodal brain imaging (3T and 7T fMRI), psychophysiology, experimental psychology, and computational approaches including pattern analysis and deep learning, to model mind-brain-behavior relations. Before joining UCLA, he was on the faculty at Northeastern University and Pomona College. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience and previously served as President of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society.

Varghese headshot

Varghese John, Ph.D.

Faculty Member

Professor
Department of Neurology
David Geffen School of Medicine 
University of California, Los Angeles

Personal Statement

I have the expertise, leadership skills, intellectual focus and motivation necessary to successfully carry out the role of contact PI on the proposal entitled “Development and testing of brain permeable MARK4-PROTAC in VCID and AD models”. I am a medicinal chemist with over 20 years of experience leading small-molecule drug discovery projects in the pharmaceutical industry in CNS related disorder with focus on Alzheimer’s disease. My research has resulted in several key publications in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and I am a co- inventor in over 100 issued and pending patents. During my tenure in industry, I was part of the original Athena/Elan AD team for 18 years. In this period I was the lead chemist of a team that made several important discoveries in AD, including identification and development of early inhibitors for the g-secretase enzyme that led to a more selective (lacking Notch activity) clinical candidate Semagecestat that proceeded into Phase 3 clinical trials sponsored by our collaborator Eli Lilly, and the purification of the beta-amyloid cleavage enzyme (BACE) from AD brain tissue using an affinity purification approach and the first-in-class potent BACE peptide inhibitor (Sinha S. et. al., Nature 1999). Using drug design and structure-based approaches, my group at Elan converted the statine-based peptidic inhibitor of BACE into small molecule (MW ~ 400Da) brain-permeable peptidomimetic inhibitors. This work was done as part of a corporate collaboration with Pharmacia/Pfizer. After leaving the pharma industry I moved to the Buck Institute in the bay area where I established the Alzheimer’s Drug Development Network (ADDN) to discover novel targets for new therapeutic development in AD. In mid-2014 I joined the UCLA Department of Neurology and my lab in Reed became fully operational in Jan of 2015. Currently, I am Professor and PI of the Drug Discovery Lab (DDL) in the UCLA Department of Neurology and a member of the Mary S Easton Center for Alzheimer’s disease research at UCLA. The lab is focused on new therapeutic approaches in AD, PD and other CNS disorders using a pharma model for drug discovery in an academic setting. UCLA is a highly collaborative academic institution and is a great place to conduct new drug discovery research on complex diseases such as AD. Our discovery efforts have led to a candidate drug , DDL110, moving through IND enabling studies and for clinical testing in AD patients. The research activities in the DDL can be characterized by an impact pyramid – one aspect focusing on high throughput screening (HTS) and analog synthesis, the second aspect focusing on CNS drug delivery of CRISPR and macromolecules including proteins and nucleotides using Synthetic Exosomes (SE) made of deformable nanoscale-vehicles, a third aspect focusing on preclinical testing for identification of candidate drugs, and a fourth aspect focusing on detection and isolation of brain derived exosomes in body fluids like blood to monitor drug efficacy and identify new targets for CNS disorders and obtain a “window into the brain”. Working with the PI Dr. Jason Hinman and the Hinman lab and DDL team on the proposal, I will apply my previous drug discovery experience which includes coordinating project research activities, providing scientific direction, facilitating communication to to achieve the proposal goals. This proposal follows logically with my training and expertise in Alzheimer’s Disease research in my Drug Discovery lab.

Ritchey Headshot

Maureen Ritchey, Ph.D.

Faculty Member

Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
University of California, Los Angeles

Personal Statement

I am interested in the cognitive and neural processes supporting episodic memory, or memory for specific events. Episodic memories influence the way we make plans and decisions, interact with others, and understand and reflect on our past. And yet, episodic memories are selective and, at times, imprecise. Why do we remember some events vividly, while others fade or change over time?

In the MemoLab, we investigate the mechanisms of memory in humans using a variety of cognitive neuroscience methods, including functional MRI, brain stimulation, eye-tracking, and computational modeling.

Some of our key questions include: How does the hippocampus interact with cortical networks to support memory reconstruction? How do we use social and conceptual priors to make predictions about events, and does this affect what we store in memory? How can we change or control what we remember about an event?

For more information and a complete list of publications, visit my lab website at www.thememolab.org.

Biography

Maureen Ritchey received her Ph.D. in Psychology and Neuroscience from Duke University, followed by postdoctoral training at the University of California, Davis. Before joining UCLA, she was on the faculty at Boston College for several years. Dr. Ritchey’s laboratory investigates the cognitive and neural underpinnings of episodic memory, taking a multi-methodological approach to understanding how we encode and reconstruct the details of complex events. This research has been supported by a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.

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