Joshua D. Grill, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry & Human Behavior and Neurobiology & Behavior at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He is the Director of the Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders (UCI MIND) and the Associate Director of the UCI Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. He also directs its Outreach, Recruitment, and Engagement Core for the UCI ADRC and is the leader of the Accrual and Retention Consult Service for the UCI Institute for Clinical and Translational Science (ICTS). Dr. Grill serves in several roles for ACTC. He is co-leader of the Recruitment Unit as well as the Internal Ethics Committee. He also serves on the Executive and IDEA-CT Committees. Dr. Grill’s independent research is focused on clinical trial design, recruitment and retention, and research ethics across the spectrum of Alzheimer’s disease.

Clifford R. Jack Jr., M.D., is Co-Lead for the ACTC MRI Unit. Dr. Jack is engaged in brain imaging research in cognitive aging and Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders.  Dr. Jack’s research group employs imaging to study the biology of brain aging and cognitive impairment. They also develop image-processing algorithms for quantitatively measuring the information obtained from brain imaging. They employ a variety of brain imaging modalities including anatomic MRI, MR spectroscopy, functional connectivity MR, diffusion MR, perfusion MR, quantitative susceptibility mapping, FDG PET, amyloid PET, and tau PET. Dr. Jack’s group serves as the MR center for many large multi-site observational and interventional studies.

Dorene M. Rentz, PsyD, is a Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and a clinical neuropsychologist with dual appointments in the Departments of Neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. She serves as the co-lead with Dr. Ron Petersen of the ACTC Clinical Outcome Instrument Unit and with Dr. Steve Salloway as co-lead of the ACTC-IDEA-CT Mentoring Sub-committee. She is also the Co-Director of the Center for Alzheimer Research and Treatment and the Director of the Outreach, Recruitment and Engagement Core at the Massachusetts Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and is the Clinical Core Leader of the Harvard Aging Brain Study. Her research focus has been on the early detection of preclinical Alzheimer’s disease, particularly in high functioning individuals. Her recent work involves exploring early cognitive changes using PET amyloid and tau imaging. More recently, she is a leader in cognitive outcome assessments for secondary prevention trials in Preclinical Alzheimer’s disease and has explored the feasibility of using technology to do cognitive assessments in the clinic and home environments.

Deborah Tobias serves as the Administrative Unit Co-Lead for the Alzheimer’s Clinical Trials Consortium (ACTC) and is the Director of Administration for the University of Southern California Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute (USC ATRI).  She is involved with coordination of ACTC and ATRI activities and interfaces with all other Units, Committees, project teams, and clinical sites.  Areas of responsibility and oversight include Regulatory Affairs, Fiscal Management, Contracts, Human Resources, Quality Assurance, and the ATRI Recruitment group.  She also serves on the ACTC Recruitment Unit, as well as, the Executive and IDEAS-CT Committees.

Devon Gessert is the Director of Clinical Operations at USC’s Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute (ATRI) and the Director of the Clinical Operations Unit for the Alzheimer’s Clinical Trials Consortium (ACTC).  She earned undergraduate degrees in Biology and Anthropology from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and a Certificate in Bioinformatics from the UCSD Extension.  

Ms. Gessert began her career in the Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study’s (ADCS) Data Core in 2000, and has had the opportunity to work with a variety of groups from academia and industry across a spectrum of clinical research and in a variety of roles – in data management, software development and project management.  In her time with the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Laboratory at UCSD, she gained experience supporting and developing data capture systems in diverse therapeutic areas beyond Alzheimer’s disease, including stroke, HIV, and multiple system atrophy.

As Director of Clinical Operations for the ADCS from 2008 to 2015, Ms. Gessert built and oversaw teams responsible for project management and data management and played a critical leadership role in helping the organization evolve into one that excelled in managing the full range of clinical studies from observational studies to early phase treatment trials to late phase registration trials sponsored by government agencies, pharmaceutical companies and public-private partnerships.  She has continued this work as the Director of Clinical Operations for the Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute (ATRI) since it was founded in 2015, building teams that have successfully transitioned into managing clinical studies with increasingly complex collaboration models, involving multiple academic groups, industry groups, CROs and vendors, in an ever-widening geographic range, currently extending from North America, to Europe, Australia, and Asia.  

Dr. Donohue co-leads the Biostatistics Unit. His primary interests include modeling the long-term, multivariate evolution of Alzheimer’s Disease, and utilizing these models to inform ACTC clinical trial design. Dr. Donohue guides the unit on the use of analytic power calculations and model-based simulations to drive clinical trial design decisions regarding sample size, duration, analysis approach, and outcome measures. He helps ensure that ACTC trials are conducted with maximum statistical power and minimum participant burden. He helped develop the first Preclinical Alzheimer’s trials, and the Preclinical Alzheimer’s Cognitive Composite (PACC). Research funded by his R01 lead to a novel hierarchical Bayesian model, the Latent Time Joint Mixed-Effects Model (LTJMM). The model can simultaneously estimate long-term trajectories of several disease markers and includes a subject-specific latent time shift parameter to account for heterogeneity in disease stage.