About the Speakers

C. Dirk Keene, MD, PhD

Professor and Chair
Department of Pathology
UC San Diego

Dr. Keene grew up in the desert southwest, received his education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (B.S. in Cell and Molecular Biology) and the University of Minnesota (M.D. and Ph.D. in Neuroscience). His post-graduate medical training in combined Anatomic Pathology residency and Neuropathology fellowship (AP/NP) was at the University of Washington (UW) where he earned a faculty position in Neuropathology in 2009. He recently became Professor and Chair, Department of Pathology, at UCSD.

He is Board-Certified in AP and NP. He previously directed the UW DLMP Division of Neuropathology, one of the largest in the US, where he led a diverse team of trainees, staff, and faculty in an ongoing effort to achieve and extend excellence in patient care, education and mentorship, and clinical, translational, and mechanistic research. He emphasizes delivery of state-of-the-art diagnostic neuropathology that leverages approaches/technologies informed by innovative mechanistic and translational research, while integrating training and mentorship at every level to develop next generation of diverse clinician-scientists.

Dr. Keene strives to support scientific advancement through diagnostic and research neuropathology. He directed the UW BioRepository and Integrated Neuropathology (BRaIN) laboratory, was the Associate Director of the UW Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC), multiple PI of the Seattle AD Brain Cell Atlas, founding director of the Pacific Northwest Brain Donor Network (PNBDN), and leader or co-leader of multiple neuropathology cores, including the UW ADRC and the CLARiTI consortium. He has co-authored over 300 peer-reviewed publications, serves on multiple national advisory boards, NIH workshops and summits, and consensus panels, and is principal investigator (PI), co-PI, or co-I on multiple large projects. A principal goal for these efforts is to responsibly steward the incredible gift of research brain donation to foster sensible sharing of these biorepository data and tissue resources with researchers to propel effective collaboration and scientific discovery. The primary goals for Dr. Keene’s research lab are to develop, deploy, and promote technologies that accentuate the scientific utility of archived and prospectively acquired human brain tissue, to utilize discoveries derived from these critical resources to develop and test hypotheses in experimental systems, and to apply this knowledge to develop therapeutic strategies.

Daniel D. Child, MD, PhD

Acting Instructor
Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology
University of Washington

Dr. Daniel Child is a board-certified neuropathologist who specializes in neurodegenerative disease, surgical neuropathology, and neuromuscular pathology. He completed medical and doctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania (MD and PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology, with a focus on Genetics and Gene Regulation), where he studied the cardiac effects of Huntington’s disease for his dissertation. He then pursued postgraduate residency and fellowship training at the University of Washington (Anatomic Pathology and Neuropathology) and was subsequently hired as faculty. His research laboratory utilizes human tissue and induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) models to understand cellular mechanisms and phenotypic heterogeneity in genetic neurodegenerative diseases, including Huntington disease, familial Alzheimer disease, and familial frontotemporal dementia/ALS.