Craig Stark
University of California-Irvine, CA·Neuroscience
Alzheimer's disease (AD) changes the brain years before symptoms appear, and brain scans are one of the main ways doctors track its onset, progression and response to treatment. Mouse models are central to AD research, but many do not closely match the human disease.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
neurodegeneration
dementia
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Characterize the brain structure, blood vessels, connectivity and metabolism of new Alzheimer's mouse models using ADNI-derived and advanced multimodal MRI plus vessel painting, comparing animals by age, sex and diet.
- Identify imaging biomarker signatures of Alzheimer's biology by merging mouse MRI data with tissue pathology and multi-omic data from partner MODEL-AD cores.
- Validate MRI biomarkers emerging from human Alzheimer's studies, including spectroscopic imaging and quantitative susceptibility mapping, in mouse models of the disease.
- Share MODEL-AD imaging and vascular data publicly with the international Alzheimer's research community and help new researchers enter the field.
More about the research
Scanning mice with the same kinds of imaging used in patients can help show which models are faithful and which brain changes could serve as early warning signs in people.
Why it matters
Finding brain-scan markers that reveal Alzheimer's disease early could help doctors diagnose patients sooner and judge whether treatments are working. By validating imaging measures in mouse models that closely resemble the human disease and sharing the data openly, this work may guide new MRI approaches for diagnosing and monitoring people with Alzheimer's.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Brian Gold
University of Kentucky, KY·Neuroscience
Test whether low blood-brain barrier water exchange, measured with the new DW-ASL MRI sequence, predicts growth of white matter hyperintensities over about 3 years in healthy older adults.
Jonathan McConathy
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Neuroscience
Acquire amyloid-PET and tau-PET scans, which detect hallmark Alzheimer's protein deposits, and MRI scans from UAB Alzheimer's Disease Research Center participants using a simultaneous PET/MRI system.
Nian Wang
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Biomedical Engineering
Measure whole-brain myelin loss, iron imbalance and axon damage over time in cuprizone-treated Thy-1 YFP-16 mice, using quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) and diffusion MRI models (DTI, NODDI, DKI).
The school
University of California-Irvine: 46 labs on PI Pages, $645M a year on research, 524 research doctorates a year.
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