About me

Paul Thompson is a Professor in the Department of Neurology and Biomedical Engineering Program at UCLA. His team's research projects focus on the neuroscience, mathematics, computer science, software engineering and clinical aspects of neuroimaging and brain mapping. Dr. Thompson obtained his M.A. in Mathematics and Classical Languages from Oxford University, England, and his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from UCLA. Dr. Thompson's team of 28 researchers includes students in neuroscience, biomedical engineering, and biomedical physics. Recent awards include the Fulbright and Hughes Fellowships (1993-1998), the Turken Award for Alzheimer's Disease research (2003), and six active NIH grants that support neuroimaging research. Collaborating with 40 imaging labs around the world, Dr. Thompson and his students have published over 1,300 publications (h-index: 68) describing novel mathematical and computational strategies for analyzing brain image databases, for detecting pathology in individual patients and groups, and for creating disease-specific atlases of the human brain. Recent work has discovered new structural and functional brain changes during brain development and degeneration, Alzheimer's Disease and other dementias, schizophrenia and bipolar illness, HIV/AIDS, methamphetamine abuse, and autism. We also study the genetic brain disorders of Fragile X syndrome, VCFS, and Williams syndrome. For many of these illnesses, we are creating population-based digital brain atlases. New computational tools, developed in the lab, are used to map how these diseases spread in the living brain, and in drug trials and basic research studies. We also have very active projects on diffusion tensor imaging of twins (to map gene effects on the brain), as well as high-field brain imaging, and medical image analysis. In more clinically-oriented projects, imaging approaches are tracking therapeutic response to antipsychotic drugs in schizophrenia, and medication effects in dementia. These collaborative projects combine the talents of students and postdoctoral researchers in neuroscience, engineering, mathematics, and clinical neurology.