Stanford ADRC Administrative Core
The Stanford Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) supports the National Alzheimer’s Project Act by serving as a shared resource to promote, enable, and enhance interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research on Alzheimer’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease related dementia. The Stanford ADRC strategy of deep phenotyping draws together multiple levels of biological data from individual volunteers with and without cognitive impairment, who are followed over time.
The Administrative Core provides the administrative structure needed to direct and facilitate the Stanford ADRC mission. It establishes the overall scientific direction, provides a forum for planning, ensures optimal use of clinical and scientific resources, and assures compliance with institutional policies and those of the National Institutes of Health. The Administrative Core is led by Dr. Victor Henderson (ADRC director) and Dr. Katrin Andreasson (ADRC associate director), and Patricia Rodriguez Espinosa directs Special Programs of the ADRC.
Victor W. Henderson, MD, MS
Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health
Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences
ADRC Director
Dr. Henderson directs the Stanford ADRC and co-directs the Stanford master degree program in epidemiology and clinical research. His research emphasizes risk factors for cognitive aging, Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders, and therapeutic strategies to maintain and improve cognitive abilities affected by cognitive aging or dementia. Dr. Henderson obtained his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University and master's degree in epidemiology from the University of Washington School of Public Health. He trained at Duke University (internal medicine), Washington University (neurology), and Boston University (behavioral neurology). He has been a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, visiting professor at the University of Melbourne (Australia), and is Honorary Skou Professor at the University of Aarhus (Denmark). He has served in leadership roles concerned with late-life cognitive disorders (chair of the Geriatric Neurology Section of the American Academy of Neurology) and midlife cognitive health (president of the North American Menopause Society; general secretary of the International Menopause Society). He serves on editorial boards and scientific advisory boards, and he has authored more than 300 scientific articles and chapters.
Kaci Fairchild, PhD, ABPP
Program Leader, PREP (Professional Research Enhancement Program)
Dr. Fairchild is the Associate Director of the Sierra Pacific MIRECC and the Fellowship Training Director for the Advanced Fellowship in Mental Illness Research and Treatment at Sierra Pacific MIRECC. She also holds an affiliate appointment as a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. She is a board-certified Geropsychologist with an active research program focused on the improving the lives of people affected by late life cognitive impairment through lifestyle interventions. Her work has been funded by the VA Office of Rehabilitation Research and Development and VA Cooperative Studies program, the Department of Defense, the National Institute on Aging, and the Alzheimer’s Association.
Nusha Askari, PhD
ADRC Executive Director
Dr. Askari has extensive clinical research, teaching and administrative experience in neuropsychology and neuropsychiatry, with special focus on dementia. During her time with the ADRC, she has actively engaged in research, education, and outreach efforts with caregivers of persons with chronic depression and persons with dementia. These include caregiving psychoeducational facilitation programs, an equine guided support program, and she volunteers as a medical qigong instructor through the Neuroscience Supportive Care Program for persons with dementia, stroke, cancer, Parkinson’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders as well as healthy adults. She is well versed in traditional mindfulness, meditation and healing practices and brings an East meets West integrative perspective to helping and healing. Dr. Askari is former professor and chair, department of Clinical Psychology & Gerontology (Notre Dame de Namur University). She has served on numerous research projects and chaired thesis and dissertation committees. She is a licenced psychologist and speaks English, Farsi, Spanish and French.
Michael Greicius, MD, MPH
Iqbal Farrukh and Asad Jamal Professor of Neurology & Neurological Sciences
ADRC Associate Director
Dr. Greicius is the Iqbal Farrukh and Asad Jamal Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He attended medical school at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, did his neurology residency at the Harvard Partners program, and completed a behavioral neurology fellowship at UCSF. He first came to Stanford in 2000 as a postdoctoral fellow and joined the faculty in 2007. Dr. Greicius is former director of the Stanford Center for Memory Disorders and leads a research team studying the genetics of Alzheimer’s disease. Current efforts in the Greicius lab are focused on identifying novel genetic variants in two groups of subjects: healthy older people carrying the high risk APOE4 genetic variant and early age-at-onset Alzheimer’s patients who do not carry the high risk APOE4 genetic variant. The goal is to identify rare but powerful genetic mutations that either protect against or cause Alzheimer’s disease, respectively in these two groups. These genetic variants will then be characterized in detail to understand how they impact disease risk and how their related molecular pathways can be targeted for novel drug development.
Elizabeth Mormino, PhD
Assistant Professor (Research) of Neurology & Neurological Sciences
ADRC Associate Director
Dr. Mormino obtained her doctorate in neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley and completed postdoctoral fellowship training in neuroimaging at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She is a neuroscientist who uses multimodal brain imaging to understand the development of Alzheimer’s disease in older adults without dementia. This work involves amyloid PET imaging, tau PET imaging, structural MRI, and functional MRI. Her research may help to identify people at risk before widespread neuronal damage has occurred. Many older adults without cognitive impairment have brain amyloid. Dr. Mormino has found great variability in the rate of decline among those who eventually progress to Alzheimer's disease, and she is examining genetic factors that influence the risk of decline.
Jamie Cramer, BS, MS
Administrative Associate
Jamie Cramer joined the Stanford University Department of Neurology in 2023 with a Bachelor of Science in Hospitality Studies and a Master of Science in Education from Colorado State University. We are pleased to have her join the Stanford ADRC team. With Jamie’s diverse scope of work over the past ten years, she’s obtained strong grant writing, organization and time management skills, along with a passion for developing connections with populations served. She’s always felt a strong pull from organizations like Stanford University where she can be a part of a larger unified community working to better the lives of others each day.
Catherine Duarte, PhD, MSc
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Dr. Catherine Duarte is a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Epidemiology & Population Health at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. She received her PhD in Epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health and her Master of Science in Social and Behavioral Sciences from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Duarte’s work evaluates upstream drivers of overall risk for, and heterogeneity in, life course health. Specifically, she examines how education and legal system policy and practice exposures in early life may shape population health, with an emphasis on cognitive aging and dementia outcomes in midlife and older age. In doing so, her work aims to contribute to systems-level interventions designed to support population health and wellbeing.
Elizabeth E. Hoyte, BS
ADRC Communications Manager
Elizabeth Hoyte, communications manager for the Stanford Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, has worked at Stanford University for over 25 years. She manages websites at Stanford for the Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences, as well as over 30 neuroscience research labs in addition to social media for Neurology & Neurological Sciences. When not developing and managing websites and curating content for social media, she is raising two young boys with her husband in the beautiful state of Colorado.
Grace (Xiaoxiao) Ma, MS
Financial Administrator
Grace Ma came to Stanford University School of Medicine in 2018 with a master degree in Accounting and over 10 years’ experience on grants management. Grace is responsible for managing both ADRC grant and institutional ADRC support.
Executive Committee
Victor W. Henderson, MD, MS
ADRC Director, Administrative and Clinical Cores
Katrin Andreasson, MD
Biomarker Cores
Frank M. Longo, MD, PhD
Administrative Core
Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD
Biomarker Cores
Jerome Yesavage, MD
Administrative Core
Maria Inmaculada Cobos Sillero MD, PhD
Neuropathology Core
J. Kaci Fairchild, PhD, ABPP
Research Education Component
Professional Research Education Program
Lisa Goldman Rosas, PhD, MPH
Outreach, Recruitment, & Engagement Core
Michael Greicius, MD, MPH
ADRC Associate Director, Administrative and Biomarker Cores
Zihuai He, PhD
Data Management & Statistics Core
Elizabeth Mormino, PhD
ADRC Associate Director, Administrative and Imaging Cores
Kathleen Poston, MD, MS
Research Education Component and Clinical Core
Patricia Rodriguez Espinosa, PhD
Outreach, Recruitment, & Engagement Cores
Birgitt Schüle, MD
Neuropathology Core and Research Education Component
Sharon Sha, MD, MS
Clinical Core
Lu Tian, ScD
Data Management & Statistics Core
Maya V. Yutsis, PhD, ABPP-CN
Clinical Core
Michael Zeineh, MD, PhD
Imaging Core