Rate My Professor Michael Donohue

Michael Donohue is Professor of Neurology at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. He serves as Associate Director of Biostatistics at the Epstein Family Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute (ATRI) and as Co-Lead of the Biostatistics Unit of the Alzheimer’s Clinical Trial Consortium (ACTC). He received his PhD in Mathematics from the University of California, San Diego in 2005. Since obtaining his doctorate, Dr. Donohue has focused on Alzheimer’s clinical trials and observational studies, including the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). He applies novel statistical methods to data from natural history studies and clinical trials to better understand the multivariate course of markers of Alzheimer’s progression and to design innovative clinical trials aimed at preventing or slowing the progression of the disease. Dr. Donohue has studied the risk of cognitive decline associated with elevated brain amyloid in cognitively normal individuals. He helped design the first intervention trial in asymptomatic Alzheimer’s disease, the Anti-Amyloid Treatment for Asymptomatic Alzheimer’s (A4) Study conducted in collaboration with Eli Lilly, and developed its primary outcome measure, the Preclinical Alzheimer Cognitive Composite. He has received grant funding to develop innovative statistical approaches for Alzheimer’s research from the National Institute on Aging, the Alzheimer’s Association, the Michael J. Fox Foundation, the W. Garfield Weston Foundation, and the Clinical and Translational Research Institute of the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Donohue also contributes to research on building predictive algorithms to identify resilience and resistance to Alzheimer’s disease and on estimating long-term disease trajectories from short-term data.

His work supports the advancement of clinical trial design and statistical methodologies in the field of Alzheimer’s disease research at the University of Southern California.