Biography
Dr. Rosenberg is a Professor of Neurology with joint appointments in Cell Biology, Neuroscience and Mathematics and Statistics. He joined the faculty of Neurology in 1976, and is currently the Director of the New Mexico Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (NM ADRC). He is the Founding Director of the UNM Center of Memory and Aging. From 1985 to 2015 he served as Chairman of Neurology, and has trained many neurologists. He graduated from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and trained there in Neurology. He studied biomedical engineering at the Technion University in Haifa, Israel. His current research is on improving diagnosis in patients with dementia by the use of biomarkers and machine learning. He is an expert in vascular cognitive impairment. He has published over 168 papers and written two books. He has been continuously funded by NIH since 1983, and is now the Principal Investigator on two large NIH grants.
Personal Statement
I am a Clinician-Scientist with clinical training in Neurology under Dr. Robert Katzman. Throughout my career I have been involved in research of the pathobiology of neurological disorders. Early studies in animals were on the role of interstitial fluid (ISF) and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). I showed that ISF moves primarily in the white matter by bulk flow rather than diffusion. This work was important for understanding the white matter injury that are involved in vascular cognitive impairment and dementia (VCID). I spent a sabbatical with Professor Michael Bradbury at King’s College in London, where I learned methods to study blood-brain barrier (BBB) physiology in rodents. My interest in the ISF and extracellular matrix (ECM), lead to the discovery of the role of matrix-metalloproteinases (MMPs) in disruption of the BBB; this work has been extensively quoted and remains a major focus of interest by many investigators. As part of the studies in the ECM, I discovered that bacterial collagenase induced an intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), leading to one of the most frequently used models of ICH. My current research is on the role of the MMPs in neuroinflammation in dementia. Those studies in rodents have been expanded into humans, and we have developed methods to measure MMPs in CSF. In addition, we adapted to humans the method to measure BBB permeability with contrast-enhanced MRI. White matter changes on MRI are important in both VCID and in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). My early interest in injury to white matter began with a patient that I reported with Binswanger’s disease (BD); this was the first BD patient diagnosed during life by CT and confirmed at autopsy. We showed that MMPs where present in the CSF of patients with VCID and that they were related to the disruption of the BBB. Recently, as part of the MarkVCID consortium, we showed that inflammatory biomarkers in the CSF, such as the MMPs could be used to separate patients with VCID from AD, and to define mixed dementia patients during life. We have a group of MRI experts, biochemists, and statisticians, and as part of VCID, we have worked closely with Charlie DeCarli’s group to identify the optimal biomarkers to use to more precisely classify dementia patients into subgroups. My role in this RFA-driven proposal will be to provide a cohort of patients that have been extensively studied and followed for multiple years with all of the biomarkers selected by MarkVCID, and to work on new methods of analysis.