Katherine P Rankin

Kate Rankin is an American neuropsychologist who is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco.

Early life and education Rankin earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Yale University. She completed her doctoral research in clinical psychology, investigating neuropsychological performance before and after coronary artery bypass graft surgery. She earned a master’s degree in theology at Fuller Seminary School of Psychology. She undertook a clinical internship at the Veterans' Affairs Northern California Health Care System’s Martinez Outpatient Clinic and the UC Davis Medical Center, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in neuropsychology at University of California, San Francisco.

Career Rankin joined the UCSF Department of Neurology as a neuropsychologist in the Memory and Aging Center. Her work integrates clinical neuropsychology with structural and functional neuroimaging to study the neural mechanisms underlying personality, empathy, social cognition and emotional processing. She has demonstrated that early changes in socioemotional processing can support earlier and more precise diagnosis. For example, Rankin showed that an inability to detect sarcasm and lies may be an early indicator of dementia.

Rankin has developed assessment tools for evaluating socioemotional functioning in individuals with cognitive impairment. She has developed medical tests, which measure empathy, theory of mind, personality traits and social signal comprehension. These have been adopted by Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers across the United States to improve diagnostic accuracy for neurological disorders, including dementia, progressive aphasia and corticobasal syndrome).

Research and career Rankin develops informatics tools that support the harmonisation of cross‑disciplinary data and analytical workflows, enabling more effective scientific collaboration, faster discovery and improved clinical decision‑making.

Selected publications