Anders Dale

Anders Martin Dale is a prominent neuroscientist and Professor of Radiology, Neurosciences, Psychiatry, and Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and is one of the world’s leading developers of sophisticated computational neuroimaging techniques. He is the founding Director of the Center for Multimodal Imaging Genetics (CMIG) at UCSD.

Dale founded and initially developed the brain imaging analysis software FreeSurfer as a graduate student at UCSD. He later co-developed FreeSurfer at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School with Bruce Fischl. In addition to FreeSurfer, his major scientific contributions include developing: a) event related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) (with Randy Buckner at Harvard), b) an in vivo method to quantify the gray matter thickness of the cerebral cortex using MRI images (with Bruce Fischl at Harvard), c) an analysis platform to combine fMRI with magnetoencephalography (MEG), d) computational morphometry to automatically label brain regions using MRI scans (with Bruce Fischl at Harvard and Rahul Desikan and Ron Killiany at Boston University), and e) MRI-based methodologies to quantify longitudinal change in brain regions (with Dominic Holland at UCSD).

Since 2013, in collaboration with Ole Andreassen at the University of Oslo, and using GWAS summary statistics (p-values and odds ratios), Dale has developed and validated methods for evaluating genetic overlap (pleiotropy) across diseases and phenotypes. These genetic pleiotropy methods have provided valuable insights across a number of diseases and identified novel single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with increased risk for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, frontotemporal dementia, corticobasal degeneration, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia and coronary artery disease. In collaboration with Rahul Desikan and Chun Fan, Dale has developed a polygenic score for quantifying the 'personalized' risk for quantifying Alzheimer's disease age of onset.

Dale studied at the University of Texas from 1983 to 1985 and earned a B.A. in Computer Science, after which he served in the Air Force. He then ran a small control systems consulting company. From 1989 to 1990 he went to Harvard and MIT on a Fulbright Fellowship, and received an M.S. in Engineering Science. He then pursued graduate studies at UCSD from 1989 to 1994.

It was during this period at UCSD that Dale began working on the development of accurate and automated algorithms for head segmentation, which is vital to the correct modeling of EEG/MEG and optical signals. He pioneered methods of combining EEG, MEG, and MRI tests to localize brain activity. He also did important work in surface-based MRI data analysis and in the mapping of the visual cortex. He received a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science in 1994, becoming one of the first graduates of UCSD's Cognitive Science Department.

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