Dr. Yaakov Stern

The ScienceDaily article Researchers Identify Brain Network That May Help Prevent or Slow Alzheimer’s said

Columbia University Medical Center researchers have identified a brain network within the frontal lobe that is associated with cognitive reserve, the process that allows individuals to maintain function despite brain function decline due to aging or Alzheimer’s disease.
 
This finding may provide a hint about how higher levels of cognitive reserve — which is believed to build by regularly engaging in mentally-stimulating activities such as taking classes, gardening and volunteering, provides protection against Alzheimer’s disease or dementia by “exercising” the brain.
 
The study was led by principal investigator Yaakov Stern, Ph.D., a professor at the Taub Institute for the Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain and director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Division of the Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center at Columbia University Medical Center.

Yaakov Stern, Ph.D. is Division Leader of the Cognitive Neuroscience Division of the Sergievsky Center, Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology (in Neurology, Psychiatry, and Psychology, in the Sergievsky Center and the Taub Institute).
 
Yaakov’s ongoing research includes:
 
Cognitive Reserve: He is interested in understanding the basis for individual differences in task performance in general, and more specifically, the reason why some individuals show more cognitive deficit than others given the same degree of brain pathology. Ongoing fMRI studies are designed to explore this issue using activation paradigms that carefully control for task difficulty and evaluating differential expression of brain networks across young and old healthy individuals and patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
 
Cognitive Consequences of Sleep Deprivation: In parallel studies, he is exploring the neural basis for differential sensitivity to the cognitive effects of sleep deprivation. He has identified brain networks whose expression during task performance is affected by sleep deprivation. Individuals demonstrating greater changes in these networks have more pronounced cognitive changes. In collaborative studies, he has found that transcranial magnetic stimulation to key nodes in this network can improve task performance.
 
Heterogeneity of Alzheimer’s disease: A prospective study is designed to explore individual differences in the rate of decline and in the manifestation of cognitive, behavioral, psychiatric, and neurologic features in AD patients. Ongoing clinicopathologic studies should give insight into this heterogeneity.
 
Yaakov edited Cognitive Reserve: Theory and Application (Studies on Neuropsychology, Neurology, and Cognition), and coauthored Aging does not affect brain patterns of repetition effects associated with perceptual priming of novel objects, APOE E4 allele predicts faster cognitive decline in mild Alzheimer’s disease, Global familiarity of visual stimuli affects repetition-related neural plasticity but not repetition priming, Impairment of nonverbal recognition in Alzheimer disease. A PET O-15 study, Age-related changes in brain activation during a delayed item recognition task, Neural network approaches and their reproducibility in the study of verbal working memory and Alzheimer’s disease, and Mediterranean diet and Alzheimer’s disease. Read the full list of his publications!
 
Yaakov earned his BA in Psychology from Touro College in 1975. He received his doctoral training in the Experimental Cognition Program at the City University of New York, where earned his PhD in 1983. He began his association with Columbia University Medical Center in 1979, when he began working on his dissertation research on cognition in Parkinson’s disease with Dr. Richard Mayeux. After earning his PhD, he was appointed postdoctoral research scientist in 1983, and eventually Professor in 1996.
 
To date, he has supervised 20 postdoctoral fellows. He has served on the editorial board of the journals Neuropsychology, Aging Neuropsychology and Cognition, and The Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology. He is currently associate editor of the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society.