The Frontal Lobes

Dr. D’Esposito earned his medical degree at the SUNY Health Science Center at Syracuse and completed a residency in Neurology and a fellowship in Behavioral Neurology at Boston University Medical Center and Braintree Rehabilitation Hospital. He was subsequently appointed Assistant Professor of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where he later became Chief of the Cognitive Neurology Division. In 2000, he was recruited to the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley to become Professor of Neuroscience, and the Director of the newly created Henry H. Wheeler, Jr. Brain Imaging Center. He also practices Neurology at the Northern California VA Medical Center. Dr. D’Esposito’s research investigates the neural mechanisms underlying cognition, how the brain recovers from injury and potential treatments for the injured brain. He has over 375 research publications, written and edited six books, and received numerous competitive NIH research grants. He has trained over 75 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows and received many clinical and academic awards. He is currently the Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Dr. Grafman has been the director of Brain Injury Research at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab ((SRALab)formally known as the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago) since 2012 and is on faculty at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in the Departments of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Neurology, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Center as well as the Department of Psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Before joining the SRALab, Dr. Grafman was briefly director of Traumatic Brain Injury Research at the Kessler Foundation in West Orange New Jersey. Prior to that appointment in 2011, Dr. Grafman was Chief of the Cognitive Neuroscience Section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland for many years. His investigation of brain function and behavior contributes to advances in medicine, rehabilitation, and psychology, and informs ethics, law, philosophy, and health policy. His study of the human prefrontal cortex and cognitive neuroplasticity incorporates neuroimaging and genetics, an approach that is expanding our knowledge of the functions of the human frontal lobes, as well as the effects of neurological disorders that impair frontal lobe brain function.