Anders M. Dale

Anders Martin Dale is a neuroscientist and professor of radiology, neurosciences, psychiatry, and cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and he is one of the world's leading developers of 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.

Early life and education Dale was born in Norway in 1964 to Major General Torstein Dale and Unn Søiland Dale. He went to college at the University of Texas from 1983 to 1985 and earned a B.A. in Computer Science, after which he served in the Norwegian 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.

In a 2003 interview, Dale explained that he had "always been interested in using quantitative modeling methods and simulations to answer biological questions, "and that as a Harvard student he had been "interested in approaching connectionist neural networks from a more biological angle." When he went to UCSD to continue his graduate work his interest "shifted to learning how to test models of how the brain works. Ideally you'd like to test your models not in anesthetized animals and brain slices, but by measuring brain activity in humans non-invasively. I wanted to study normal people doing normal tasks. That was what brought me to imaging. My goal was to see what kind of things we can measure non-invasively that can be quantitatively related to the models we want to build....I wanted to know what exactly we are measuring, how can you model it, and how can you relate the signal to what is going on in the brain physiologically...at a level that say you could measure invasively and that you could relate to parameters of quantitative models." His thesis work at UCSD, he said, "was on the EEG and MEG forward and inverse problems, and how to use anatomical information to constrain the solutions. It is clear that if you only use EEG or MEG measures, the spatial precision is not good enough to make inferences at a scale that's most useful to neuroscience. That led us into trying to use information with higher spatial resolution to constrain or bias our estimations of the signal sources in the brain."

CorTechs Labs In 2001 Dale co-founded with Áine Behan the neuroimaging company CorTechs Labs Incorporated in La Jolla, California, for which he serves as Chief Scientific Advisor. NeuroQuant® has since been studied in a variety of neurological pathologies beyond its initial intended purpose for Alzheimer's Disease such as traumatic brain injury (TBI) and epilepsy.

Other professional activities Dale was on the consulting faculty of the NIMH Training Program in Cognitive Neuroscience 2011–2012.

Awards 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Young Investigator Award for Human Brain Mapping 1994-1996 Norwegian Research Council Career Development Award 1990-1994 McDonnell-Pew Fellow at UCSD 1988 Fulbright Fellowship at Harvard University

Selected publications Dale has published articles across numerous scientific and medical disciplines, in a wide range of journals including Science, Nature, Neuron, PNAS, PLOS Genetics, Plos Medicine, Molecular Psychiatry, Annals of Neurology, Acta Neuropathologica, Radiology, and Circulation.