Howie Rosen, MD

Professor

Department of Neurology

University of California, San Francisco

Dr. Howard Rosen is a behavioral neurologist and is the Dorothy Kirsten French Foundation Endowed Professor for Parkinsonian and Other Neurodegenerative Disorders. He received his medical degree from Boston University School of Medicine, trained in internal medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and subsequently completed a neurology residency at University of California, San Francisco. After residency, Dr. Rosen pursued fellowship training in brain imaging at the Washington University School of Medicine, and then returned to UCSF to join the team at the Memory and Aging Center (MAC) in 1999.As part of the Memory and Aging Center and the UCSF Department of Neurology, he participates in the training of medical students, residents and fellows, and participates in the evaluation of new patients in the MAC clinic. He leads multiple projects that examine clinical and imaging changes in neurodegenerative disease, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally, including ALLFTD – a multisite studies of FTLD. He has also been director of the Imaging Core at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center for nearly 10 years. He is also director of education and outreach for the education core in UCSF’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

Research Description

For the past 20 years, Dr. Rosen’s work has focused on characterizing typical and atypical neurodegenerative diseases using a variety of behavioral and imaging techniques. In particular, he has focused on clinical and imaging characterization of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) – a pathological entity that causes a variety of changes in language and socioemotional function. He uses psychophysiology and imaging to examine how these diseases affect the emotional systems and to determine how imaging and other biological markers can be used to track and anticipate how these diseases evolve over time.