Arjun Masurkar, MD, PhD

Dr. Masurkar is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at NYU Langone Health. He earned his BS in Electrical Engineering at MIT, focusing on the mathematical description of information processing in electrical circuits. Looking to apply this to biomedical problems, during his MD/PhD at Yale University he studied odor processing in the rodent olfactory bulb by applying a variety of in vitro and in vivo imaging and electrophysiology techniques. This was followed by neurology residency at Columbia University, where he developed a clinical interest in Alzheimer disease (AD). He remained at Columbia to pursue this clinical interest with a fellowship in behavioral neurology and neuropsychiatry. Simultaneously, he  obtained postdoctoral scientific training, applying optogenetics and multiphoton microscopy to functionally interrogate memory circuits relate to AD. Now at NYU, he combines clinical practice in dementia and translational research program in AD that utilizes a two-pronged approach. At the bench, his team uses AD mouse models to study the differential vulnerability of neural circuits to early AD and their relationship to early cognitive and behavioral symptoms. The approach combines a variety of molecular, histological, imaging, and electrophysiological techniques. Second, as Clinical Core Director of the NYU Alzheimer’s Disease Center, he leverages its longitudinal clinical study of human subjects and its associated brain bank to translate his bench findings and explore analogous structure-function relationships in human AD.