Sarah Savoia, PA-C, is a practicing clinician in cognitive behavioral neurology, who completed her training at Yale Medicine, and is now an assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at UT Health San Antonio. Her clinical and research focus at the Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s & Neurodegenerative Disease is to transform dementia care management practices for both patients and their caregivers and to help investigate for new promising treatments that aim to restore function. As a National Institute on Aging (NIA)-designated Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center in South Texas, we are collaborating with other institutions and community stakeholders to improve previously underrepresented patient populations’ access to studies and clinical care, including those with Down Syndrome, to expand our understanding of Alzheimer’s biology and to rapidly translate and implement our findings into effective preventive interventions and therapies.

Dr. H. Diana Rosas is an adult neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Harvard Medical School (HMS). She graduated from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and completed her training in Neurology and a post-doctoral fellowship in Memory Disorders, at MGH. She has been on the faculty since 1997 and is currently an Associate Professor in the Departments of Neurology and Radiology/Athinoula Martinos Center at MGH/HMS.

She is the Director of the MGH MIND Clinic, a multi-disciplinary clinic that supports patients with neurodegenerative disorders and Co-Director of the Aging & Developmental Disabilities Clinic, which assesses and supports adults with Down syndrome, based at McLean Hospital. For more than 20 years, she has been actively involved in the design and implementation of clinical trials using medications aimed at helping treat symptoms or slowing the progression of neurological disorders.

For the past 18 years, Dr. Rosas has been the Director of the Center for Neuroimaging of Aging and Neurodegeneration, a translational clinical research program funded by the National Institutes of Health, that focuses on developing neuroimaging biomarkers to understand changes that occur in the brain as part of normal aging and which may be accelerated in neurodegenerative diseases. She is an active member of the Alzheimer’s Biomarker Consortium-Down Syndrome and is involved with several other initiatives focusing on issues related to aging in Down Syndrome.

Dr. Lai graduated with honors from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and is board certified in Neurology and Psychiatry with special qualifications in Child Neurology. She trained in Pediatrics at the Albert Einstein Hospital/Jacobi Medical Center and finished a Child Neurology residency at Boston University/Boston City Hospital. She served as medical director of the Fernald Medical program of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center where she headed a teaching program in developmental disabilities for Neurology and Pediatrics residents and was honored with a teaching award. It was at EKS that she developed her keen interest in adults with Down syndrome and published a large prospective study of Alzheimer disease in Down syndrome in 1989, considered a “seminal” paper.

Dr. Lai founded the Aging and Developmental Disabilities Clinic at McLean/Massachusetts General Hospitals in 1994, devoted mainly to adults with Down syndrome who have an especially high risk for Alzheimer disease, and has personally evaluated and followed more than 750 patients. She was chosen to pilot an APOE genotyping study in adults with Down syndrome and published its results.

In addition to consulting on several federal studies on Down syndrome, Dr. Lai was the site PI for the first clinical trial in adults with Down syndrome using Vitamin E as a potential treatment for Alzheimer disease, and recruited over 70 participants of a total 350 among 24 sites. She is completing five years as the MGH site PI of the NIH study “Biomarkers of Alzheimer Disease in Adults with Down syndrome” and is active on the Clinical and Neuropathology cores. Dr. Lai also continues her pediatric neurology role in leading the MGH Learning Disorders Clinic devoted to children and young adults with learning disabilities and ADHD and derives great pleasure in their academic successes.

Dr. Krinsky-McHale has been a research psychologist with the New York State Institute for Basic Research in Developmental Disabilities since 1995, and is the head of the Laboratory of Cognition and Development. She conducts research on cognitive functioning and developmental processes in adults with Down syndrome and in individuals with other forms of intellectual disability (e.g., Williams syndrome). Her laboratory is also examining the neuropsychiatric symptoms that are associated with mild cognitive impairment/Alzheimer’s disease and how these change during disease progression. Dr. Krinsky-McHale has unique expertise in the areas of cognition, visual perception and neuropsychiatric symptomatology, and have been at the forefront of research focused on recognition of the earliest indicators of dementia in adults with Down syndrome.

Dr. Fortea combines his research and clinical activities at the Hospital of Sant Pau in Barcelona and the Catalan Foundation for Down Syndrome in Barcelona, Spain. He is the founder and director of the Down Syndrome Unit. This unit runs a pioneering population based health plan for adults with Down syndrome in Catalonia. This program is the foundation for the Down Alzheimer Barcelona Neuroimaging Initiative (DABNI), the largest single center cohort with multimodal biomarker studies to study Alzheimer´s disease pathophysiology in Down syndrome.

Dr. Fortea has extensive experience in clinical practice and in medical research, with a focus on the early diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer’s disease and Down syndrome-related Alzheimer’s disease. His expertise is recognized internationally, and is an active participant of the NIA-N Study section, National Institutes of Health (US), the International Scientific Committee of the Jerome Lejeune Foundation (France), as well as at the Clinical Research Committee from the Trisomy 21 Research Society and the Down Syndrome Professional Interest Area, Alzheimer’s Association (US).

Dr. Strydom’s research focuses on mental disorders in adults with neurodevelopmental conditions, including Down syndrome and other genetic disorders.

Dr. Strydom is particularly interested in ageing-related conditions such as dementia in adults with Intellectual Disability and Down syndrome. He is the chief investigator of the LonDownS consortium which consists of several research groups from prominent London universities (KCL, UCL, QMUoL, Birkbeck and the Crick Institute) collaborating on various aspects of Alzheimer’s disease in Down syndrome. One of the important aims of the consortium is to deliver the knowledge, tools and expertise that is necessary to enable clinical trials of treatment to prevent or delay the onset of dementia in individuals with Down syndrome.

He is also involved in developing and evaluating complex interventions in adults with intellectual disabilities such as positive behavior support for challenging behavior, and cognitive behavior therapy for depression, as well as RCTs of medication treatments to reduce morbidity associated with intellectual disabilities.