Bradley Christian, PhD

Director

About

Principal Investigator, Waisman Center
Professor, Department of Medical Physics and Department of Psychiatry
Co-Core Director, Brain Imaging Core

Dr. Christian is Co-Director of the Waisman Brain Imaging Lab and is a Professor of Medical Physics and Psychiatry. He received his Ph.D. in 1994 in Medical Physics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with his thesis research conducted in PET physics under the mentoring of Professor Jerry Nickles. He then completed postdoctoral training in at Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of Iowa focusing on PET neuroreceptor mapping. He joined the faculty at UW–Madison in 2005. His research is focused on the development of PET methodologies to investigate neurochemical changes in the brain and studying novel radioligands to characterize neurotransmitter-protein interactions and how they are influenced by development, genes, environment and drugs. He is a principal investigator on the Alzheimer’s Biomarker Consortium – Down Syndrome (ABC-DS) multicenter study, which is a longitudinal observational study stemming from a project initiated in 2009 through a collaboration with the UW–Madison and the University of Pittsburgh. At present, it involves studying a cohort of > 500 individuals with Down syndrome and sibling controls across 10 performance sites with a team of over 100 co-investigators.  The findings from this investigation have carefully characterized AD-related biomarkers and their relationship with cognitive function, providing the foundation to initiate clinical trials for the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease for the DS population. He has co-authored more than 250 original scientific articles in peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Christian is the associate Director of the Waisman Center Intellectual and Developmental Disability Research Center (IDDRC).