Biography: Born and raised in Las Vegas, NV, Judy left the night lights to head to Southern California for college.She attended the University of California, Irvine and majored in Psychology with emphases in Philosophy and Education.After completing Dr. Kourosh Saberi's Sensation and Perceptual Processes course, she developed a passion for investigating the relationship between cognition and the human brain.As an undergraduate, she volunteered in Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan's Human Neuroscience Laboratory where she investigated the neural correlates of consciousness and binocular rivalry using EEG.After graduation, she worked at the UC Irvine Child Development Center under the direction of Drs. James Swanson and Timothy Wigal as the Project Manager on the MTA-project, a multi-site, NIH-funded, longitudinal study on the Multimodal Treatment of ADHD in children.Although she enjoyed the clinical research, she decided to pursue higher education in basic neural functioning.She joined the Cognitive Sciences department at UC Irvine and worked in the Laboratory for Cognitive Brain Research.She worked under the supervision of Dr. Gregory Hickok and investigated the organization of sensory-motor networks in musicians and hearing signers using functional MRI (fMRI).She attained her PhD in 2007 and returned to clinical research at the University of California, San Francisco Memory and Aging Center (MAC).She completed her 2 year postdoctoral fellowship on the investigation of heterogeneous Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) subgroups under the direction of Dr. Julene K. Johnson. In July 2009, she was appointed a faculty position in the Department of Neurology under the mentorship of Dr. Adam Gazzaley.
Research Description: Judy was recently awarded a 5-year K01 Mentored Research grant from the National Institute on Aging. Her research agenda centers around the investigation of functional and structural alterations in attention and memory networks in MCI and healthy aging. Using a combination of cognitive, behavioral and neuroimaging methods, she aims to understand these processes from a multidisciplinary approach. She hopes to identify early predictors of cognitive decline and to better characterize the track of cognitive and neural change during disease progression.
Publications:
Johnson, J.K., Pa, J., Boxer, A.L., Kramer, J.H., Freeman, K., & Yaffe, K. (in press). Baseline Predictors of Clinical Progression Among Patients with Dysexecutive MCI. Dement Geriatr Cogn Disord.
Pa, J., Possin, K.L., Wilson, S.M., Quitania, L.C., Kramer, J.H., Boxer, A.L., Weiner, M.W., & Johnson, J.K. (2010) Gray Matter Correlates of Set-Shifting among Neurodegenerative Disease, Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Healthy Older Adults. J Int Neuropsychol Soc.
Chao, L.L., Pa, J., Duarte, A., Schuff, N., Weiner, M.W., Kramer, J.L., Miller, B.L., Freeman, K.M., & Johnson, J.K. (2009) Patterns of Cerebral Hypoperfusion in Amnestic and Dysexecutive MCI. Alz Dis Assoc Disord, 23(3): 245-252.
Possin, K.L., Brambati, S.M., Rosen, H.J., Johnson, J.K., Pa, J., Weiner, M.W., Miller, B.L., & Kramer, J.H. (2009) Rule Violation Errors are associated with Right Lateral Prefrontal Cortex Atrophy in Neurodegenerative Disease. J Int Neuropsychol Soc, 15(3): 354-364.
Pa, J., Boxer, A.L., Freeman, K., Kramer, J., Miller, B.L., Chao, L.L., Gazzaley, A., Weiner, M.W., Neuhaus, J., & Johnson, J.K. (2009) Clinical-Neuroimaging Characteristics of Dysexecutive Mild Cognitive Impairment. Ann Neurol, 65(4): 414-423.
Hickok, G., Okada, K., Barr, W., Pa, J., Rogalsky, C., Donnelly, K., Barde, L., & Grant, A. (2008). Bilateral Capacity for Speech Sound Processing in Auditory Comprehension: Evidence from WADA procedures, Brain and Language, 107(3): 179-184.
Pa, J., Wilson, S.M., Pickell, B., Bellugi, U., & Hickok, G. (2008) Neural Organization of Linguistic Short-term Memory is Sensory Modality-Dependent: Evidence from Signed and Spoken Language, J Cogn Neurosci, 20(12): 2198-2210.
Pa, J., Hickok, G., (2008) A Parietal–Temporal Sensory–Motor Integration Area for the Human Vocal Tract: Evidence from an fMRI study of Skilled Musicians, Neuropsychologia, 46(1): 362-8.
