By Susan Landau

How cognition and memory change with aging is actually a really big and active area of research. My first interest in the field was in the study of cognition and I started working on functional MRI and also basic cognition.

So, how the brain works from a more fundamental level and I've transitioned into more clinical research, so research that has a more direct clinical application and can potentially affect the population in a more direct way than basic research and that's been my motivation for going the direction that I've been in.

You can't really study memory without studying what happens in aging. And so taking that to the next level in terms of how disease affects the memory system, it's a sort of a logical step as far as, you know, having the work be connected to a population that needs treatment. There's a long way to go, not just Alzheimer's disease, but neurodegenerative disease in general.

There's a lot of questions and as neuroimgaging technology has progressed, it's become more and more possible to link the basic research with clinical applications to that research and Alzheimer's disease is one of the biggest potential questions out there that needs to be solved.

(Susan Landau is a research scientist/UC Berkeley)

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