Mesulam Center Faculty and Staff Profiles

By: Ananya Chandhok 

Meet four incredible members of the Mesulam Center, Todd Parrish, Jane Stocks, Kate LaFroscia, and Jordan Behn. Each are contributing uniquely to unraveling the mysteries of the brain and advancing cognitive health through groundbreaking research and collaboration.

Todd Parrish, PhD, professor of radiology and director of the Mesulam Center Imaging Core, is a brain cartographer. His life’s work is mapping brains.

Attempting to study every nook and cranny of the brain, he looks at tissue, structure, and chemical composition.

“Finding biomarkers that can predict how people are going to progress cognitively is an important thing to understand for treating people down the road,” Parrish said. 

His team helps develop and run studies to understand brain function at every stage of development. One project involves mapping brains of three-month-old children and imaging them over the course of their lives, until some of them potentially become SuperAgers — people who are 80 years old or older with the memory capacity of individuals 20 to 30 years younger.

“We span the whole range of people and their brains and look at all kinds of different components within it,” Parrish said. Parrish called his and fellow collaborators’ efforts rewarding, seeing how the project has grown over the years.

“Dr. Mesulam, Dr. Ken Paller, Dr. Darren Gitelman, and I formed this cognitive brain mapping group to really try to understand functional imaging,” he said. “Now, it’s bloomed into something that allows all the faculty members to get together and understand.”

Another irreplaceable part of Parrish’s team is the lab’s MRI devices, named Tuna and Tarpon after Parrish’s love for all things fish. Even his office pays homage to his love for fish and teamwork. Framed front and center, his workspace’s wall is adorned with crimson-colored cascades of fish swimming across the paper. Created by a pair of artists, the work embodies a team spirit and shows just how far a community can take a project.

In spring of 2024, he was named as the director of the Mesulam Center Imaging Core. Just hitting the tip of neuroimaging’s iceberg, Parrish is looking forward to seeing how brain mapping continues developing through the Center. “We’re not done discovering new uses for MRIs,” he said.

“The technical challenges are what keep me coming to work every day.”

Jane Stocks, PhD, found her way back to the Mesulam Center after working alongside Sandra Weintraub, PhD, during her time as a clinical neuropsychology student.

Now a Florane and Jerome Rosenstone Behavioral Neurology Postdoctoral Fellow, her days are a 50-50 split between clinical work and research. Half of her time is spent at the Neurobehavior and Memory Clinic, where she interacts with patients and conducts neuropsychological assessments. And during the other half of her time, she calls the Center her home, conducting neuroimaging research with the primary progressive aphasia team.

Stocks loves her personal time in her office, running analyses and working through brain imaging, but she thrives on teamwork too.

“My favorite part is collaborating with the neuropsychologists,the imagers, the research assistants, and just being part of such a wonderful interdisciplinary team,” she said.

For her, the team extends beyond her colleagues and includes the patients, research participants, and caregivers.

“You can’t understand the lived reality of neurodegenerative diseases without working directly with patients and their families,” Stocks said.

“That really motivates you and provides such important context into the types of research questions that we should be asking.”

If Stocks could go back to her first day on the job, she would share the lessons she learned along the way.

“Step outside of your office,” she said. “And don’t be afraid to have lots of conversations. We work with such esteemed clinicians and researchers that it can be hard to just strike up a conversation or suggest a collaboration. But that’s where the magic of the Center comes from: in a question lobbed across the hallway, or poking into somebody’s office and saying, ‘What do you think about this finding?’”

Kate LaFroscia, MPH, research project manager and team lead for the Clinical Core team, just celebrated her two-year anniversary at the Mesulam Center.

During her early days at the Center, she did not know what to expect when working in a clinical setting. But now she sees how her role connects researchers and research participants for a common goal: improving livelihoods for people with cognitive deficits and differences.

LaFroscia’s day-to-day work involves keeping the Clinical Core team accountable. She tracks project goals and helps expand research participation for all research studies affiliated with our Clinical Core, including the Northwestern University SuperAging Program Study (NUSAP).

LaFroscia believes that without enrollment, there is no study, and so her responsibilities involve explaining research goals and impact to prospective participants.

“Research is so interesting,” LaFroscia said. “People that want to be involved in research typically are doing it because they have family members that have a diagnosis, or they are really motivated to find a cure for a disease.”

Working with families who are donating their loved ones’ brains to research have been some of the most impactful experiences for her.

LaFroscia’s master’s in public health from the University of South Carolina helped her understand how social determinants impact cognitive health. “I’ve realized how important our Center’s goal of recruiting more diverse groups is,” she said.

LaFroscia shares her passion for clinical research with the rest of the Mesulam Center team. “I love the people I get to work with,” she said. “I think everyone here is so passionate about what they do.”

Jordan Behn, senior clinical research coordinator at the Mesulam Center, sees research as a journey and not a linear path ending at a destination.

“I think I could never really be a full head-down, data-analysis person,” Behn said. “My favorite thing is working through technical problems with my colleagues, supervisors, and mentees.”

Bringing research results to life, Behn crunches data for the Bonakdarpour Lab and the primary progressive aphasia team at the Mesulam Center. “I was interested in finding something a little bit more clinical, where the research I was doing was more directly and visibly being applied to help someone,” he said.

Behn is usually involved in multiple projects at once. Analyzing neuroimaging data, dating back 20 years, and using electrode stimulation for activating brains are just some of his responsibilities.

Behn remembers one project involved mountains of data and “babysitting” a computer for four weeks straight. “There’s always a new question to ask and to try to answer through the lens of this longitudinal data,” Behn said.

 “I really liked the organization around sorting data from all of these different participants, who have gotten all of these different scans, and who have all of these different language tests they have taken,” he said.

All those days of sifting through data helped map the hundreds and thousands of points, so “anyone could look at this database” and find the answers they need, Behn said.

While data drives Behn, the research participants reminded him why his work is so important in the first place. “One participant wrote thank you cards for everyone…With language deficits, that must have been so hard for her,” he said. “But she found a way to express gratitude to all of us,” he said.

For anyone starting a new journey at the Center, Behn suggests diving in head-first. “Get involved as soon as you can,” Behn said. “And just try stuff. There are so many different kinds of things you can be exposed to,” Behn said.