Jim McAleer

Jim is the CEO and president of Alzheimer’s Orange County and Healthy Aging Center: Acacia. Additionally, he mentors and leads an Executive Team comprised of highly qualified and industry-experienced individuals, in developing and implementing the agency’s strategic plan.

Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy is an award-winning television news journalist and nonprofit executive with a broad and diverse background leading some of the world’s most recognizable and respected charities. She has raised more than $100 million during the course of her career for organizations that improve the lives of children and families, cancer research, and important capital projects. Deborah joined the Alzheimer's Association as executive director for Orange County in April 2021.

Joshua Grill, PhD

Joshua Grill, PhD is a Professor of Psychiatry & Human Behavior and Neurobiology & Behavior at UCI. He serves as Director of UCI MIND, Associate Director of the UCI Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, and Leader of the Recruitment & Retention Unit for the UCI Institute for Clinical and Translational Science. His research focuses on clinical trials across the spectrum of Alzheimer’s disease, and he has published a number of important findings on trial design, recruitment and retention, and research ethics.

Renaud La Joie, PhD

Heather Wilkins, PhD

Dr. Wilkins earned her B.S. in Microbiology from Kansas State University in 2008, followed by her PhD from the University of Denver in 2013, where her dissertation focused on mitochondrial oxidative stress in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and earned her a distinguished thesis award. She then joined the KU Alzheimer's Disease Research Center as a postdoctoral fellow under the mentorship of Dr. Russell Swerdlow, transitioning to faculty at the University of Kansas Medical Center in 2019.

Dr. Wilkins' research is centered on understanding how brain energy influences Alzheimer's disease pathology, utilizing induced pluripotent stem cells from human subjects to develop neuron, glia, and cerebral organoid ("mini brains in a dish") models of sporadic Alzheimer's disease. She serves as assistant director of the KU Alzheimer's Disease Research Center Mitochondrial Genomics, Metabolism, and Biomarker core, where she leads new biomarker development for Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Wilkins is an active member of the Alzheimer's Association International Society to Advance Alzheimer's Research and Treatment and the Alliance of Women Alzheimer's Researchers.

Puja Agarwal, PhD

Dr. Puja Agarwal is a trained nutritionist and nutritional epidemiologist at the RUSH Alzheimer's Disease Center and an Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine at RUSH University Medical Center. She completed her undergraduate and master's degrees in nutrition at the University of Delhi, India, her PhD at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and a post-doctoral fellowship at Rush under Dr. Martha Clare Morris. Dr. Agarwal's research focuses on the role of modifiable lifestyle factors — particularly nutrition and the MIND diet — in brain health, cognitive health, and dementia prevention, and she is widely recognized as an expert in the field.

She serves as Vice Chair of the Alzheimer's Association-Nutrition, Metabolism, and Dementia PIA and as an Associate Lead of the Research Education Component at the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. Her work has been published in high-impact journals including NEJM, Neurology, JAMA Neurology, Alzheimer's and Dementia, Nutritional Neuroscience, and the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and is funded by the Alzheimer's Association, the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Disease, and the NIH's National Institute on Aging. Her long-term goal is to identify how nutrition, lifestyle factors, and related metabolism may prevent or delay neurodegenerative diseases among diverse older adults.

Katrine Whiteson, PhD

Katrine Whiteson is a Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at the University of California, Irvine, and co-Director of the UCI Microbiome Center, with 18 years of experience in microbiome research. Drawing on an interdisciplinary background in biochemistry, clinical microbiology, and ecological theory, she leads a research group focused on how microbial interactions influence health across the gut–brain axis, with a particular emphasis on Alzheimer's disease and dietary interventions. She co-founded the UCI Microbiome Center alongside Prof. Jennifer Martiny and serves in leadership roles with the International Microbiome and Multi-Omics Standards Alliance (IMMSA) at NIST and as a Senior Editor for the ASM journal mBio. Her work integrates microbiome sequencing, metabolomics, and translational science to advance microbiome-informed therapeutics and solutions for human health.

Jill K. Morris, PhD

Mark Mapstone, PhD

Mark Mapstone, Ph.D., is a Professor of Neurology and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Neurology at the University of California, Irvine, where he also serves as Chief of the Neuropsychology Division and Co-Director of the Center for Aging Research in Down Syndrome. With a background in clinical neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience, his research focuses on cognitive aging, blood-based biomarkers of age-related brain disease, and Alzheimer's disease risk in people with Down syndrome. He has led and contributed to numerous NIH-funded studies, including the Alzheimer's Biomarker Consortium – Down Syndrome (ABC-DS) and the UCI MODEL-AD consortium, integrating metabolomics, proteomics, and multi-omic approaches to identify early markers of neurodegeneration. With an h-index of 40 and nearly 6,000 citations, his work has made significant contributions to the fields of Alzheimer's disease biomarker discovery and precision medicine, including two ISI Highly Cited Papers.

Alireza Atri, MD, PhD