User:Cogneurogeek/sandbox

Yaakov Stern is a cognitive neuroscience researcher at Columbia University. Stern has an undergraduate degree in psychology from Touro College, and a doctorate in psychology from City University of New York. He has been on faculty at Columbia University his entire career, where he now is a professor of neuropsychology and directs the Cognitive Neuroscience Division of the Neurology department.

Research
Stern’s earliest work focused on identifying cognitive changes in nondemented patients with idiopathic Parkinson’s disease, which helped identify the cognitive role of the basal ganglia when it was widely believed to have a role only in motor function. He validated these observations in patients with MPTP-induced Parkinson’s disease.

In the long-standing study Predictors study, Stern has been working to clarify the heterogeneity in the course of Alzheimer’s disease. He identified a set of disease features that are associated with more rapid decline, and created prediction algorithms for disease course. Stern also directs the Reference Ability Neural Network (RANN) study, which is examining the neural basis for key cognitive domains in aging.

Major contribution
Stern’s major contribution has been developing and researching the concept of cognitive reserve, which helps to explain differential susceptibility to age- or disease-related brain changes. In 1994 he demonstrated that when patients with Alzheimer’s disease are matched for clinical severity, those with higher education had more extensive neurodegeneration, indicating that they could cope more successfully with the underlying Alzheimer’s pathology. He was one of the first to use prospective incidence studies to demonstrate that individuals with higher educational or occupational attainment, or who engage in more late life leisure activities have a reduced risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. He was the first to observe that Alzheimer’s patients with higher reserve had a more rapid rate of decline. In 2002 he published his first systematic treatment of the concept of cognitive reserve. Much of his later work has focused on the potential neural basis of cognitive reserve using imaging studies.

Stern has authored or co-authored and published over 550 articles in academic journals. His H index according to Google scholar is 147. He also edited a book on cognitive reserve.