Administration
Daniel L. Alkon, M.D.
Memory and Memory Disorders Program
Dr. Daniel L. Alkon received his undergraduate degree in chemistry in 1965 at the University of Pennsylvania, where, with post-graduate studies in physical chemistry, he began his career in biomedical research. After earning his M.D. at Cornell University and finishing an internship in medicine at the Mt Sinai Hospital in New York, he joined the staff of the National Institutes of Health. During his 30 year career at NIH, he became a medical director in the U.S. Public Health Service at the NINDS and chief of the Laboratory of Adaptive Systems. Dr. Alkon joined the Blanchette Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute as scientific director in 1999. He was named as recipient of the Toyota Chair in Neurodegenerative Disease Research for Distinguished Research at the Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute in 2006 and is a professor of neurology in the West Virginia University School of Medicine.
Dr. Alkon’s laboratory at the Blanchette Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute conducts a multidisciplinary research program on the molecular and biophysical mechanisms of associative memory and memory dysfunction in psychiatric and neurological disorders, particularly Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Alkon and his colleagues have discovered a convergence of memory physiology and pathophysiology that is guiding development of diagnostics and drug discovery with potential to treat neurodegenerative disorders (e.g. Alzheimer’s disease), mental retardation, and attention-deficit disorders. In recent years, he and other colleagues have incorporated some of the memory-storage principles they derived from biological brain networks into the patented designs of artificial, computer-based networks. These networks have generated pattern recognition systems with rapid self-organizing functions that offer a broad range of practical applications.
As an internationally recognized pioneer in research on brain-based neural networks and the molecular basis of memory, he has authored hundreds of scientific articles as well as several books including Memory Traces in the Brain by Cambridge University Press, and the popular book Memory’s Voice by Harper Collins.