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Xiaoyan Sun, MD, PhD

Dr. Sun started her medical career as a neurologist in China. She obtained her Ph.D. in neuroscience in Japan. She completed her neurology residency training at the Medical University of South Carolina in the United States. She completed a cognitive and behavioral neurology fellowship at the VA Boston Healthcare System in the United States. Her research activities have been primarily focused on Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders. Her earlier work includes characterization of biochemical properties of tau protein in the axonal transport and roles of amyloid protein in Alzheimer’s disease. She is one of the earliest researchers to establish quantitative amyloid ELISA in the field. Her long-term efforts are dedicated to identifying biomarkers for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Currently, she is working on the role of CSF synaptic proteins in cognitive function. She has been invited to be a reviewer for multiple journals on Alzheimer’s research. Dr. Sun provides clinical care to patients with cognitive disorders at the Memory disorder clinic of the University of Miami. She is also involved in educational programs for medical students, neurology residents, and is the Education Director for the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Miami. She is a co-director of the brain endowment bank in University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. Save [/av_textblock]

Bonnie E. Levin, PhD

Dr. Bonnie Levin is the Alexandria and Bernard Schoninger Professor of Neurology and Director of the Division of Neuropsychology in the Department of Neurology at the University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine. She received her BS from Georgetown University and her PhD from Temple University. She completed an internship at the Boston Children’s Hospital where she was a clinical fellow in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and an externship at the Boston VA Hospital.

Dr. Levin is a neuropsychologist whose research examines neurocognitive and affective changes associated with neurodegenerative disease and the normative aging process. Her work examines the role of cardiometabolic risk factors in cognitive decline. Another focus has been the inter-relationship between behavioral and motor symptoms in Parkinson’s disease and the neural circuitry underlying memory and age related cognitive change. Her current work is aimed to advance our understanding of frontal striatal circuit function in cognition and to generate data that will improve our knowledge of key clinical parameters associated with differential rates of cognitive decline. Current projects include: examining which components of the metabolic syndrome predict cognition, identifying imaging and clinical correlates of white matter changes associated with the aging process and linking structural and metabolic markers underlying different symptom profiles in neurodegenerative disease.