Brescia, 26.2.1961

General information
Work address: IRCCS San Giovanni di Dio – FBF, via Pilastroni 1, 25125 Brescia (I)
Tel +390303501261, Fax +390303501313,
email gfrisoni@fatebenefratelli.it
Date and place of birth: Brescia (I), February 26, 1961
Nationality: Italian
Family: father of 4 children aged 6 to 14, the partner is a geriatrician and psychotherapist.

Training
1986: graduated in Medicine at the University of Brescia with 110/110 cum laude. The dissertation was published in Behavioral Brain Resarch.
1990: specialized in Neurology at the University of Parma. The dissertation was published in Stroke.
1993, 1994, 1996: training in epidemiology at the School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
1998: sabbatical in population epidemiology at the Department of Geriatrics, Karolinska Institute (head: Bengt Winblad) as a Visiting Scientist

Clinical appointments
1985-1990: residency in Neurology, University in Brescia, head Luigi A. Vignolo
1991: founding staff neurologist at the Alzheimer's Unit, IRCCS (Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico – Scientific Institute of Research and Care) Fatebenefratelli Hospital, Brescia, Italy (IRCCS-FBF). The IRCCS-FBF was the first Italian Alzheimer’s Clinic and is funded by the National Health System to carry out research and provide advanced care to patients with Alzheimer’s and psychiatric diseases.
1991-1999: Head of the Day Hospital at IRCCS-FBF, a diagnostic and rehabilitation service with 15 patients with cognitive impairment daily.
2000-2004: temporary interruption of clinical duties following a request from the Scientific Direction of the IRCCS-FBF, aiming to foster domestic scientific productivity.
2005-to date: Head of the Psychogeriatric Ward at the IRCCS-FBF, a long-tern 40-bed ward devoted to elderly psychiatric patients with behavioral disturbances. The medical staff is made of trained and specialized physicians (2 psychiatrists and one geriatrician).

Scientific appointments
1999-to date: head of the LENITEM – Laboratory of Epidemiology Neuroimaging & Telemedicine at the IRCCS-FBF, a research facility with a staff of 20 to 25 (currently 3 post-docs, 3 PhD students, 15 fellows, and 5 students). The research at the LENITEM focuses on imaging of cognitive disturbances with the tools of clinical epidemiology and aims to develop protocols for more accurate and earlier diagnosis, improve the understanding of disease pathophysiology, and translate scientific acquisitions into clinical practice. For 3 years, telemedicine services for the remote diagnosis and assessment of patients with cognitive disturbances have been provided by LENITEM.
2000-to date: founding editorial board member of The Lancet Neurology, and editorial board member of Journal of Neurology, Alzheimer Disease & Associated Disorders, and Aging Clinical and Experimental Research.
2003-2004: Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Insubria, Varese, Italy.
2003-to date: Scientific Coordinator of the Northern Italy branch of the AFaR – Associazione Fatebenefratelli per la Ricerca, the scientific arm of the Fatebenefratelli (St John of God) hospital network. St John of God Brotherhood Order is the largest private multinational health corporation, featuring 389 health care facilities in 49 countries of 5 continents.
2003-to date: Coordinator of the Neuroimaging Interest Group of the EADC – European Alzheimer’s Disease Consortium, the network of EU academic Alzheimer’s Centres.
2007-to date: Vice Scientific Director of the IRCCS-FBF. The staff of IRCCS-FBF is made of 7 senior researchers, 10 post-docs, about 50 fellows, and 25 students.
2008-to date: member of the executive committee of the Neuroimaging Working group of the SIN – Italian Society of Neurology.
2008-to date: member of the executive committee of the Neuroimaging Interest group of the ENS – European Neurological Society.
2009-to date: Imaging Section Editor of Neurobiology of Aging.

Leadership of international projects
1997: Scientific coordinator of the EU-funded study SCUD – The Special Care Units for Demented: a Controlled Study of Effectiveness.
2005: Principal Investigator of the ENIR – European NeuroImaging Repository, an EU FP6-funded project involving 14 Alzheimer’s centres throughout Europe (www.enir.eu).
2005: Principal Investigator of the Pilot E-ADNI - The European Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative: a pilot study of the European Alzheimer’s Disease Consortium, a project funded by the Alzheimer’s Association and involving 7 Alzheimer’s centres throughout Europe (http://www.centroalzheimer.it/E-ADNI_project.htm) with a close connection with the large NIH-funded effort ADNI – Alzheimer’s Diseases Neuroimaging Initiative (www.adni-info.org).
2008: Principal Investigator of AFaR-funded project Imaging correlates of bipolar and borderline personality disorders. This project is the first European initiative of the St John of God Brotherhood Order and involves 4 academic hospitals in Italy, Spain, and Austria.
2008: Principal Investigator of neuGRID - A Grid-Based e-Infrastructure for Data Archiving/ Communication and Computationally Intensive Applications in the Medical Sciences, a € 2.8 M project funded under EC FP7 (www.neuGRID.eu).

Research activity
OVERVIEW
GBF is author of over 250 publications indexed in Medline (28% of which as the lead and 24% as the last author) and 25 books and book chapters. The full list of publications can be accessed by querying “Frisoni G[au] NOT (Frisoni G[author] AND Biomacromolecules[journal])” from PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez). Summary statistics of the scientific production as of Feb 22, 2009 are provided below.
Sum of the Times Cited: 3,636
Average Citations per Item: 12.00
h-index: 33

GBF’s impact on the scientific community has been increasing steadily over time. While the crude number of publications shows a trend to increase over time, but with a couple of peaks and draughts due to only temporarily conductive local circumstances (left graph), thanks to the increasingly accurate choice of scientific journals, citations have increased steadily at an exponential rate from 1990 to date (right graph).
GBF’s scientific interests have always been marked by a strong focus on issues related to patient care and can be divided into 4 periods: the early times, the “geriatric” period, the “Alzheimer’s” period, and the more recent “psychogeriatric” period.

Personal scientific history
The early times (late eighties to early nineties). This is the period between graduation at the general medicine and neurological specialty school (1986 to 1990), when GBF published as the first author his first full paper on a the case of a young man with disulfiram polyneuropathy and review of the literature (ref #255). The general medicine and neurological specialty dissertations found space in Behavioral Brain Research (second author) and Stroke (first author), respectively (#249 and #251). While attending his residency in neurology, he observed a couple of peculiar neurological cases whom he described (#253, #250).
Notably, under the Italian educational system, there were no obligation to publish scientific manuscripts neither for dissertations nor residency.
The “geriatric” period (mid to late nineties). In 1989 GBF joined the group of Marco Trabucchi, former President of the Italian Geriatric Society, under whose leadership he started entertaining interests in cognitive disturbances and geriatric topics at large, publishing as a first author in J Am Geriatrics Soc, (#235) and J Gerontol (#242, #227) and contributing statistical and clinical expertise to a large number of studies on disability, falls, nutrition, comorbidity, frailty, caregiver issues, quality of life, insight, organizational research, cognitive and physical rehabilitation, etc.
In this period, the two main areas of personal interest were apoE and imaging. GBF has been the first to report on the association between apoE and vascular dementia (#239 in JAMA), of apoE with rate of disease progression (#228 on Ann Neurol), and the first to study apoE in dementia in Italy. The line of research on apoE has been ideally closed with an editorial in the JNNP (#203). His first functional and structural imaging studies were aimed to standardize the then exquisitely subjective reading of imaging exams (e.g. #217 in AJNR) and use imaging tools to improve diagnostic accuracy (e.g. #212 in JNNP and #184 in Neurology). On these issues, again, has been the pioneer in Italy and has summarized his achievements in the field of imaging with non computational tools in an editorial appeared in the JNNP (#151).
The “Alzheimer’s” period (late nineties to mid-2000). In 1999, with the birth of the LENITEM, GBF’s scientific interests have veered more strongly towards the clinical application of imaging techniques. With the birth of computational neuroscience, he has been the first in Italy to apply voxel-based morphometry to neurological patients (#125) and adopt the more sophisticated methods of cortical and hippocampal mapping (#119 in Lancet Neurol, #63 in NeuroImage, and #52 in Brain). In this period, GBF has taken the lead of the Neuroimaging Interest Group of the EADC – European Alzheimer’s Disease Consortium and produced a European consensus document on the use of neuroimaging tools to rate key imaging features (#114), brought the ADNI methods for multicentre MR image acquisition from the US to Europe (#23), and has investigated the diagnostic and therapeutic procedures of Italian dementia expert centres (#17, #43, #60, #86, and #117). Lastly, he has summarized the relevant advances in dementia research of the year 2006 in the January 2007 issue of The Lancet Neurology.
The “psychogeriatric period” (late nineties). In this period, GBF has followed the traditional lines of research on Alzheimer’s and cognitive disturbances but has opened the new line on psychiatric diseases. In his traditional research field, GBF has been the first Italian to publish on amyloid imaging (#32 in Lancet Neurol and #0 in Neurology), the first to show evidence of validity of the new revised criteria for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease worldwide (#000), and, to the best of my knowledge, the first to test the new revised criteria in a clinical service (the “Translational Outpatient Memory Clinic” at the IRCCS-FBF, described in Frisoni et al., submitted).
With the appointment as Head of the Psychogeriatric Ward, GBF has taken up the new line of research on psychiatric diseases. The clinical population of the ward is made of scientifically “non ideal” patients, i.e. psychiatric patients (mainly schizophrenics) over 65 years of age, with decades of the most diverse pharma and non-pharma treatments. By applying the analytical tools successfully used in patients with neurodegenerative disorders, GBF has been able to describe their brain structural features in a paper soon to appear in Biological Psychiatry (#00), and more manuscripts are currently in preparation. Moreover, thanks to the use of a creative approach to study hundreds of healthy persons with MR imaging, he has described the structural features of a normal personality trait, i.e. alexithymia (#1).

Personal scientific history
Picking and leading people. In his 20 years’ career, GBF has tutored dozens of young physicians, psychologists, and non biomedical professionals. In his working Institution, he is credited with the ability of picking young talents and teach them the principles of the scientific method with passion, discipline, and commitment.
Cooperativeness. GBF boasts a large number of cooperations at all geographical levels, from the IRCCS-FBF institution (senior coauthors Zanetti, Binetti, Gennarelli, Miniussi, and Geroldi), to the national level (Caltagirone, Trabucchi, Soricelli, Beltramello, Padovani, Babiloni, Nobili, Falini, Rozzini, Bellelli, Perani, Filippi, Pantoni, Rossini), the European level (Vellas, Winblad, Soininen, Rinne, Tihonen, Giannakopoulos, Robert, Scheltens, Barkhof, Hampel, Touchon, David Smith, Wahlund, Fox, Waldemar), and the International level (Whitehouse, Toga and Thompson, De Carli, Weiner, Ferrucci, Collins, Jack, Csernansky, Davatzikos, De Leo).
His approach can be summarized in the motto “always negotiate, never compromise”, meaning that a balance among the different agendas of scientifically driven people can as a rule be stricken in all cooperative projects, but this should never occur at the expense of methodological integrity and scientific soundness.
Creativity. In his native Country, GBF is credited with the peculiar achievement of having been able to produce top rank products in the absence of an institutional scanner. Indeed, the IRCCS-FBF is not hosting any radiological facility, and imaging research has been carried out thanks to cooperation agreements with neighboring facilities and painstakingly elaborate fine tuning of image acquisition protocols and continuous remote quality control.