Neurologist
I am working to better diagnose and more accurately predict dementia, with the goal of making dementia preventable and even curable.
Boon Lead is a neurologist who specializes in various dementia syndromes, particularly primary progressive aphasia.
Mahatma Gandhi
Unconventional thinking, Initiating relationships
To reduce the scale and impact of dementia, Boon Lead believes we need to stop treating dementia as a natural process of aging and stop regarding elders as dependent individuals with less value of life.
Boon Lead is developing linguistically and culturally adapted cognitive assessment tools for Chinese populations that suffer from neurodegenerative diseases and studying their neural basis variability. This potentially helps provide better clinical diagnosis and care for a more diverse population.
As an Atlantic Fellow, Boon Lead has had the privilege to meet people from different professional backgrounds who share a common goal: to care/treat/cure dementia and promote brain health. She has felt supported with resources for international collaboration to help the dementia population.
Dementia care and research have largely focused on Alzheimer’s disease in Taiwan and Malaysia. Equally debilitating and fatal neurodegenerative diseases such as primary progressive aphasia and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia lack adequate recognition in most Asian countries.
Boon Lead received her medical school training from the National Taiwan University Hospital. She then completed her neurology residency training from National Taiwan University Hospital and En Chu Kong Hospital. She also pursued her master's degree in Clinical Medicine Research at National Taiwan University. After completing her master's degree, she joined the Atlantic Fellows for Equity in Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI). She recently joined the Department of Neurology at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center as an Assistant Professor.
Boon Lead
a Note