J. Wesson Ashford, MD, PhD, Stanford / VA Alzheimer Center.  Dr. Ashford is Senior Research Scientist at the Stanford / VA Alzheimer Center. He is involved in coordinating, as a principal investigator, the first clinical trial aiming to evaluate Leptin as a therapeutic for Alzheimer's disease.   He has ample experience as a Lead Investigator in clinical trials sponsored by the NIH and corporations: The PET scan project and the first double-blind study of a cholinesterase inhibitor to treat Alzheimer's Disease, among others. Dr. Ashford is leading an international group of scientists to advocate for wide-spread screening for dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. He has been developing dementia measurement tools and screening tests that can be used for early detection of this prevalent condition and applied to the rapid and precise assessment of the efficacy of experimental treatments.  Prior to joining Stanford/ VA in 2003, he served as faculty at Southern Illinois University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of Kentucky, reaching the rank of tenured Associate Professor. He also directed the Geriatric Psychiatry Clinic at UCLA between 1980 and 1985 and the Lexington VAMC Memory Disorders Clinic.    His seminal work includes application of the basic physical principle of Relative-Time to dementia severity measurement, extended to the fields of Alzheimer’s disease and genetics. In addition, he originally proposed the now widely accepted theory of neuroplasticity as the vulnerable factor in Alzheimer’s disease. In 1989 he conceived the first application of Modern Test Theory in the field of Medicine using Item Characteristic Curve analysis to explain the properties of a cognitive test that has been popular for measuring dementia severity. Earlier, his PhD dissertation was a finalist for the Donald B. Lindsley Prize of the Society for Neuroscience, as the first to show physiologically how the brain uses massive parallel distributed processing to analyze information.   Dr. Ashford attended UCLA attaining an M.D. degree, a Ph.D. in Neuroscience and finishing his psychiatry residency.  He obtained his BA from the University of California, Berkeley.