Longo Lab Members

Frank M. Longo, MD, PhD
George E. and Lucy Becker Professor in Medicine
Professor of Neurology & Neurological Sciences

Dr. Longo is the George E. and Lucy Becker Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University. He received his MD and PhD from the University of California, San Diego. Following an internship in medicine at New York University, he trained as a resident in neurology at UC San Francisco where he also completed a fellowship in neurobiology. He joined the UCSF faculty and eventually served as professor and vice chair of UCSF’s Department of Neurology. Before joining Stanford in 2006, Dr. Longo was the H. Houston Merritt Professor and Chair of Neurology at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. At Stanford, he served as the Chair of the Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences from 2006 to 2023. He is also a faculty member of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford.

His research interests include elucidation of mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative diseases and translational research targeting such mechanisms. Dr. Longo is the 2015 recipient of the inaugural Melvin R. Goodes Prize for Excellence in Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery from the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, and he currently serves on the National Advisory Council on Aging for the NIH. He is founder and board chair for PharmatrophiX, a clinical-stage company focused on small molecule therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases.
 

Amira Latif-Hernandez, PhD
Instructor, Neurology and Neurological Sciences

Amira obtained her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the KU Leuven, Belgium, in the summer of 2017. One of the most gratifying contributions of her doctoral studies was the development of a new electrophysiology tool to assess synaptopathies and the establishment of long-term synaptic plasticity from prefrontal cortex slices to characterize the pathophysiology of novel mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease. In Autumn of 2017, she moved to the Longo laboratory at the Stanford School of Medicine. During 3 years of post-doctoral work, she independently established a multi-electrode array system that allows high-throughput analyses of multiple long-lasting forms of synaptic plasticity. Her projects involve neuronal plasticity, RNA-sequencing, molecular biochemistry, signaling mechanisms, target validation and drug development strategies for Alzheimer’s disease with the objective of investigating neurotrophin receptor signaling pathways that contribute to synaptic degeneration and preservation. In October 2020, Amira was appointed Instructor of Neurodegenerative Disease Research at Stanford Neurology, to help develop improved and more powerful approaches that will better reveal key synaptic mechanisms and candidate modules associated with neuroplasticity and affected in AD mouse models, by identifying activity-dependent gene expression signatures that will ultimately serve as a platform for potential therapeutics and animal to human translation. When Amira is not dedicated to science, she truly enjoys running, hiking, dancing, cycling, boxing, cooking, reading books, writing journals, and, when possible, camping, surfing and climbing.