Marsel
Mesulam received the degrees of Bachelor of Arts in
1968 and Medical Doctor in 1972, both from Harvard University.
He was appointed Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School
where he founded and led the Behavioral Neurology Unit of Boston’s Beth
Israel Hospital. In 1994 he was appointed the Dunbar Professor
of Neurology and Psychiatry and the Director of the multidepartmental
Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Center at Northwestern
University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
His research has addressed the connectivity of the
monkey brain, the organization of human cholinergic pathways, the
representation of cognitive functions by large-scale neurocognitive
networks, and the neurobiology of dementias. He introduced a new
method for tracing neural pathways by axonal transport, identified
the source of cortical cholinergic pathways in the primate brain,
and characterized a unique form of language-based dementia known
as primary progressive aphasia.
His students and trainees lead laboratories
and clinics around the world. He has published more than 300
research papers and edited a popular textbook of Behavioral and
Cognitive Neurology. He is a past Vice President of the American
Association of Neurology and a past President of the Organization
of Human Brain Mapping. His current research focuses on the functional
imaging of neurocognitive networks and on the pathophysiology of
focal dementias. |