Interests
Kate Rankin, PhD
Professor of Neuropsychology
To reduce the impact of dementia, we need easy to use, accessible tools that make it easier for all clinicians to diagnose patients early in the disease, provide the correct treatments, and tailor the right care plan for every individual.
Current Work
Kate is a neuropsychologist whose passion is studying how the brain enables us to make and maintain social and emotional connections. She also works to help researchers and clinicians communicate better with each other, building tools that bring richer data quantification to bear on understanding each individual patient.
Personal Hero
All my colleagues
Words of Strength
Valuing everyone's unique contribution
Vision
To reduce the impact of dementia, we need easy to use, accessible tools that make it easier for all clinicians to diagnose patients early in the disease, provide the correct treatments, and tailor the right care plan for every individual.
Strategy
I create and validate simple neuropsychological tests that can be used to identify socioemotional symptoms in dementia patients, allowing early and accurate diagnosis. I also build educational tools supporting the primary care clinicians who are first to identify these patients.
Motivation
We are working to create new ways for valuable new research discoveries about dementia diagnosis and care to impact clinical care more quickly and broadly, with the goal of ensuring every patient gets the very best clinical care.
Education & Experience
Dr. Kate Rankin is a Professor in Residence in the Memory and Aging division of the UCSF Department of Neurology. She trained at Yale, Fuller, and UCSF, earning a PhD in Clinical Psychology with a specialization in Neuropsychology. At the MAC she uses quantitative neuroimaging to investigate the underpinnings of human socioemotional behaviors such as empathy, self-awareness, social cue detection, and theory of mind, in healthy aging adults and patients with neurodegenerative disease. She also designs and builds informatics tools for harmonizing cross-disciplinary data and analytic processes to facilitate scientific collaboration, accelerate discovery, and improve clinical care.
Featured Publications
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Kate
a NoteHave ideas for global brain health or a collaboration? I would love to hear from you. Feel free to send an introductory note.
