Arthur W. Toga, Ph.D.
University of California, Los Angeles
Dr. Toga is a professor of neurology and Associate Dean at the Geffen School of Medicine, Associate Vice Provost at UCLA, the founder and director of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, associate director of the UCLA Brain Mapping Center and the founding editor-in-chief of the journal NeuroImage. He holds the chairmanship of numerous committees within UCLA, NIH and a variety of international task forces and is a member of the UCLA Brain Research Institute and past director of admissions of the neuroscience graduate program.
His research is focused on neuroimaging, mapping brain structure and function, and brain atlasing. He studies structural and functional relationships in normal and pathological conditions in populations using a variety of imaging approaches. He also studies cerebral metabolism and neurovascular coupling, was trained in neuroscience and computer science and has written more than 550 papers, including chapters, reviews and eight books. Recruited to UCLA in 1987, Toga formed and directs the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging. This 110-member laboratory includes graduate students and scientists from neurobiological disciplines, computer science, physics, mathematics and others, and houses one of the largest computing facilities of any University of California research laboratory.
With his diverse team, Toga has been responsible for a number of breakthrough advances in various areas of neuroscience and has studied neuroanatomic variability within specific subpopulations. Spanning from cellular architectural morphology to whole brain systems, specific research projects focus on the developing human brain, dementing diseases such as Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, brain tumor, depression, fetal alcohol syndrome, autism and other psychiatric and neurological diseases. This research has resulted in new statistical methods for quantitating structure/function relationships as determined in a variety of brain imaging modalities. He has developed unique mathematical techniques for global and local warping of images and multidimensional modeling as well as visualization of composite brain image sets (e.g., anatomy, histology, autoradiography, rate of change and pharmacological variables).
Toga has received numerous awards and honors in computer science, graphics and neuroscience, received the SPIE image processing ‘cum laude’ award, the Di Chiro Award for Outstanding Scientific Researcher and was a finalist in the American Medical Informatics Association 1997 best theoretical paper competition. He received the Smithsonian Award for Scientific Innovation in 1999, and was also given the Telly Award and the Communication Award in 1999.