MICHAEL WEINER, MD, PROJECT PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Dr. Weiner is Director of the Center for Imaging of Neurodegenerative disease at the VA Medical Center, and Professor of Medicine, Radiology, Psychiatry and Neurology at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

Dr. Weiner was one of the first investigators to obtain NMR spectra on an intact animal and began human studies with NMR and MRI in the early 1980s. He has been studying Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases since 1988. His research group has over 70 individuals who are developing and applying new MRI and MR spectroscopy techniques to human brain research. He was the winner of the Young Investigator Award of the American College of Cardiology, and currently has over 320 publications and over $90 million of research grant support. He is the Principal Investigator of the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative which is a $60 million  5-yr, multicenter study of 800 subjects.

BERNARD HAISCH, PhD, PROJECT CO-INVESTIGATOR and EDITOR

Dr. Haisch is an astrophysicist and author of over 130 scientific publications. He served as a scientific editor of the Astrophysical Journal for ten years, and was Principal Investigator on several NASA research projects. After earning his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Haisch did postdoctoral research at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. His professional positions include Staff Scientist at the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory; Deputy Director of the Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley; and Visiting Scientist at the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Extraterrestrische Physik in Garching, Germany. He was also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Scientific Exploration.

SUSAN SWARD, RESEARCH ASSOCIATE

Sward is a writer who has covered both San Francisco city government and California politics extensively. Her coverage of scientific issues has included work on the AIDS epidemic’s beginnings and the issue of toxic contamination of water supplies.

Along with her work on the project, she works as a freelance journalist for the New York Times after a career covering politics, the environment and other social issues for the San Francisco Chronicle. When she left the Chronicle in 2009, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Northern California chapter gave her its lifetime career achievement award.

One of Sward’s roles in the Data Sharing Project is conducting interviews with leading scientists on how data should be stored in the future. Many of those interviews are on the project website.

Sward received her undergraduate degree in psychology from Stanford University and her masters in journalism from UCLA.