Paul Thompson, PhD
University of Southern California
Dr. Paul Thompson is a Professor in the Keck School of Medicine of USC. His team’s research projects focus on the neuroscience, mathematics, computer science, software engineering and clinical aspects of neuroimaging and brain mapping. Honored with the 2023 Pioneer in Medicine Award of the Society of Brain Mapping and Therapeutics, and the U.S. Alzheimer Association’s Zenith Award. Paul Thompson directs the ENIGMA Consortium, a global alliance of 2500 scientists in 47 countries who conduct the largest studies of 30 major brain diseases – ranging from Parkinson’s disease, anorexia, schizophrenia, depression, ADHD, bipolar illness and OCD, to HIV and addictions and their effects in the brain. ENIGMA’s genomic screens of over 70,000 people’s brain scans and genome-wide data (published in Nature Genetics, 2012; Nature, 2015; Science, 2020) have brought together experts from 300 institutions to unearth over 500 genetic variants that affect brain structure, disease risk, and brain connectivity. At USC, Dr. Thompson is a Professor of Neurology, Psychiatry, Radiology, Pediatrics, Engineering, and Ophthalmology, and Director of the ENIGMA Center for Worldwide Medicine, Imaging & Genomics – a $11M NIH Center of Excellence in Big Data Computing. Using worldwide medication screens, ENIGMA discovers factors that affect the progression of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, schizophrenia, depression and childhood brain disorders. Dr. Thompson also directs AI4AD – an $18M NIH Initiative on AI methods to accelerate Alzheimer’s disease research, discovering novel treatment targets; he directs the India ENIGMA Initiative – large-scale study of brain aging in India. He directs the USC Imaging Genetics Center – a group of 50 scientists in Marina del Rey. His team created the first maps of Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia spreading in the living brain, and a method to track brain growth in children. Dr. Thompson has an M.A. in mathematics and Greek and Latin Languages from Oxford University, and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA.Collaborating with imaging labs around the world, Dr. Thompson and his students have published over 1,500 publications (h-index: 206) describing novel mathematical and computational strategies for analyzing brain image databases, for detecting pathology in individual patients and groups, and for creating disease-specific atlases of the human brain.Recent work has discovered new structural and functional brain changes during brain development and degeneration, Alzheimer’s Disease and other dementias, schizophrenia and bipolar illness, HIV/AIDS, methamphetamine abuse, and autism. For many of these illnesses, Dr. Thompson’s Center is creating population-based tools to understand factors that resist them. New computational tools, developed in the lab, are used to map how these diseases spread in the living brain, and in drug trials and basic research studies.