Luigi Maccotta, M.D., Ph.D.
Address:
UCSF MC 2512
Mission Bay – Byers Hall Room 102
1700 4th Street
San Francisco, CA 94158-2330
email: luigi.maccotta [at] ucsf.edu
lab: 415-476-2164
fax: 415-514-4451
Curriculum Vitae (pdf)
Biography: Luigi was born in Turin, Italy, where he grew up until the age of 16, when he decided to "go West" and attend a US high school as an exchange student. He fell in love with the US, where he decided to continue his academic career. He attended St. Peter's College in New Jersey, where he obtained a double major in physics and mathematics. He was briefly in the graduate program in physics at the University of Pennsylvania, before realizing that his true interest lay elsewhere, namely in neuroscience. At Penn he worked in the lab of Dr. John Detre of Neurology, where he learned the basics of fMRI research and developed an interest in neuroscience, neurology and fMRI methodology. In 1997 he moved to St. Louis to attend medical school in the Washington University MD/PhD program. Luigi spent 4 and half of the next 8 years working in the lab of Randy Buckner, his Ph.D. thesis advisor. There he focused on understanding the mechanisms of neural priming, a non-conscious form of memory, using fMRI. With Randy he also continued to develop his now decade-long interest in fMRI methods, and nurtured an interest in the clinical applications of fMRI, specifically to the study of cognition in temporal lobe epilepsy patients. In 2005 he graduated from Washington University and moved further West, to San Francisco, now a full 9 time zones from his starting point in Turin! At UCSF he did one year of internship in Internal Medicine, before joining the UCSF Neurology residency program in 2006. He is currently in his last year of residency.
Research Description: Luigi's current research effort focuses on the study of attention and memory in the aging population. Specifically, he is interested in understanding how the aging brain handles a temporally rich flood of information, and what parts of the system break down as a result of age. Our ability to handle a rapid stream of complex stimuli, such as one experiences when driving a car in heavy traffic, can already be taxing when young. In the old population, this becomes even more challenging. What part of the system breaks to cause this? He hopes to elucidate the mechanisms underlying this breakdown using multiple tools, including behavioral, fMRI and EEG techniques. Extending this approach to pathological cognitive decline, such as that observed in the dementias, would be a natural next step.
Publications:
1. Maccotta L., Detre J.A., Alsop D.C. (1997) The efficiency of adiabatic inversion for perfusion
imaging by arterial spin labeling. NMR in Biomedicine, 10: 216-221.
2. Detre J.A., Alsop D.C., Vives L.R., Maccotta L., Teener J.W., Raps E.C. (1998) Noninvasive
MRI evaluation of cerebral blood flow in cerebrovascular disease. Neurology, 50: 633-641.
3. Detre J.A., Maccotta L., King D., Alsop D.C., Glosser G., D’Esposito M., Zarahn E., Aguirre
G.K., French J.A. (1998) Functional MRI lateralization of memory in temporal lobe epilepsy.
Neurology, 50: 926-932.
4. Miezin F.M., Maccotta L., Ollinger J.M., Petersen S.E., Buckner R.L. (2000) Characterizing
the hemodynamic response: Effects of presentation rate, sampling procedure, and the
possibility of ordering brain activity based on relative timing. Neuroimage, 11(6, Part 1): 735-
759.
5. Baker J., Sanders A.M., Maccotta L., Buckner R.L. (2001) Neural correlates of verbal memory
encoding during semantic and structural processing tasks. Neuroreport, 12: 1251-1256.
6. Maccotta L., Zacks J.M., Buckner R.L. (2001) Rapid self-paced event-related functional MRI:
Feasibility and implications of stimulus- versus response-locked timing. Neuroimage, 14: 1105-
21.
7. Barch D.M., Mathews J.R., Buckner R.L., Maccotta L., Csernansky J.G., Snyder A.Z. (2003)
Hemodynamic responses in visual, motor, and somatosensory cortices in schizophrenia.
Neuroimage, 20: 1884-93.
8. Maccotta L., Buckner R.L. (2004) Evidence for neural effects of repetition that directly
correlate with behavioral priming. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16: 1625-1632.
9. Baciu M.V., Watson J.M., Maccotta L., McDermott K.B., Buckner R.L., Gilliam F.G., Ojemann
J.G. (2005) Evaluating functional MRI procedures for assessing hemispheric language
dominance in neurosurgical patients. Neuroradiology, 47: 835-844.
10. Maccotta L., Buckner R.L., Gilliam F., Ojemann J.G. (2007) Changing frontal contributions to
memory before and after medial temporal lobectomy. Cerebral Cortex, 17: 443-56.
11. Maccotta L., Sherr E.H. (2008) Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation for the treatment of
childhood cerebral X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy. Nature Clinical Practice Neurology, Epub
ahead of print.
