François Boller, M.D., Ph.D. has been co-Series Editor of the Handbook of Clinical Neurology since 2002. He.is a board-certified neurologist currently Professor of Neurology at the George Washington University Medical School (GW) in Washington, DC. He was born in Switzerland and educated in Italy where he obtained a Medical Degree at the University of Pisa. After specializing in Neurology at the University of Milan, Dr. Boller spent several years at the Boston VA and Boston University Medical School, including a fellowship under the direction of Dr. Norman Geschwind. He obtained a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio where he was in charge of Neuroscience teaching at the Medical School and was nominated Teacher of the Year. In 1983, Dr. Boller became Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh where he founded and directed one of the first NIH funded Alzheimer Disease Research Centers in the country. In 1989, he was put in charge of a Paris-based INSERM Unit dedicated to the neuropsychology and neurobiology of cerebral aging. He returned to the United States and joined the NIH in 2005, before coming to GW in July 2014.Dr. Boller's initial area of interest was aphasia and related disorders; he later became primarily interested in cognitive disorders and dementia with emphasis on the correlates of cognitive disorders with pathology, neurophysiology and imaging. He was one of the first to study the relation between Parkinson and Alzheimer disease, two processes that were thought to be unrelated. His current area of interest is Alzheimer's disease and related disorders with emphasis on the early and late stages of the disease. He is also interested in the history of Neurosciences and is Past President of the International Society for the History of Neurosciences. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Neurology, the official Journal of the European Federation of Neurological Societies (now European Academy of Neurology). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology and a member of the American Neurological Association. In addition, he has chaired Committees within the International Neuropsychological Society, the International Neuropsychology Symposium, and the World Federation of Neurology (WFN). He has authored over 200 papers and books including the Handbook of Neuropsychology (Elsevier).Dr. Grafman has been the director of Brain Injury Research at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab ((SRALab)formally known as the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago) since 2012 and is on faculty at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in the Departments of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Neurology, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center as well as the Department of Psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Before joining the SRALab, Dr. Grafman was briefly director of Traumatic Brain Injury Research at the Kessler Foundation in West Orange New Jersey. Prior to that appointment in 2011, Dr. Grafman was Chief of the Cognitive Neuroscience Section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland for many years. His investigation of brain function and behavior contributes to advances in medicine, rehabilitation, and psychology, and informs ethics, law, philosophy, and health policy. His study of the human prefrontal cortex and cognitive neuroplasticity incorporates neuroimaging and genetics, an approach that is expanding our knowledge of the functions of the human frontal lobes, as well as the effects of neurological disorders that impair frontal lobe brain function.
