Paul Thompson
University of South California, Los Angeles, USA
Paul Thompson directs the USC Imaging Genetics Center and serves as Associate Director of the new Institute for Neuroimaging and Informatics at the University of Southern California.
At USC, he is a Professor of neurology, psychiatry, radiology, pediatrics, engineering and ophthalmology, and serves as Associate Dean for Research at the Keck USC School of Medicine. He co-founded and leads the Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics Through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) consortium, a worldwide medical network of 125 institutions studying the major diseases of the brain. ENIGMA discovers factors that affect the progression on Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, schizophrenia, depression and bipolar illness, HIV/AIDS, methamphetamine abuse, autism, and childhood brain disorders. One study unites teams from the Thai Red Cross, the US, and South Africa to study how treatments restore brain growth in HIV-infected children.
His group also created the first maps of Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia in the living brain, and a method to detect brain growth in children. Thompson obtained his M.A. in mathematics and classical languages from Oxford University, England, and his Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.