Paul M. Thompson

UCLA

Department of Neurology
Associate Professor of Neurology
635 Charles Young Drive, NRB 225E
Los Angeles, California 90024
United States
310 206 2101

Paul Thompson's Website
Paul Thompson's Projects
Paul Thompson's Research Team
CV
NIH Biosketch
NSF Biosketch

Patient populations being studied include large numbers of subjects with Alzheimer's Disease, with mild cognitive impairment, and people at genetic risk for Alzheimer's Disease. Another project studies how HIV/AIDS damages the brain. Other active projects focus on understanding brain changes and drug effects in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. We are studying chronically-medicated populations, first-episode patients, twins discordant for schizophrenia, and children and adolescents with early onset schizophrenia. Our interest in how schizophrenia develops has also led us to expand our studies of brain development . We also study bipolar disorder (in adolescents and adults) and drug effects on the brain (lithium, antipsychotics, anti-dementia drugs). We are creating new approaches to map how the brain grows in childhood and in the teenage years. Finally, we are especially interested in mapping genetic influences on brain structure. Even in normal individuals, it is intriguing to understand how our genes (and other factors) affect our brain structure and function. It can also help us investigate the genetic causes and inherited risks for disease. Part of this work involves constructing population-based brain atlases to encode and represent patterns of anatomic variation, and to detect structural differences in health and disease. These approaches often use some very interesting mathematics as well as high-performance computing techniques. We also have active research projects on methamphetamine abuse, autism, Williams syndrome, fragile X syndrome, brain asymmetry, and IQ (cognitive ability).