Kathleen Rockland

Background information

Dr. Rockland received her doctorate at Boston University School of Medicine (1979), working on feedforward and feedback cortical connections with Dr. Deepak Pandya. She completed postdoctoral studies on patchy horizontal intrinsic collaterals with Jennifer Lund at the Medical University of South Carolina, and began an independent laboratory in 1983 at the E.K. Shriver Center (Waltham, MA), continuing to work on cortical connectivity in non-human primates. In 1988 she joined the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at Chobanian & Avedisian SOM as an assistant professor, before moving in 1991 to the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa. A collaboration with Keiji Tanaka (Brain Science Institute at RIKEN, Wako, Japan) led to an invitation to join BSI as lab head, where she established the Lab for Cortical Organization and Systematics (2000). After taking sabbatical leave from BSI at Tonegawa Lab (MIT), she returned to the Dept. of Anatomy and Neurobiology in 2012, where she has started a new lab, with a major emphasis on microstructure of human postmortem cortex and the neurovascular unit in AD and mouse models of AD.

Laboratory Website: http://www.bumc.bu.edu/anatneuro/research/cortical-org/
Loop Profile in Frontiers : http://loop.frontiersin.org/people/135/overview

Research Interest
Dr. Rockland’s long-term interest, as a trained neuroanatomist, has been in cortical connections and cortical organization in the normal nonhuman primate. A particular expertise, for over 15 years, as been analysis of connectivity (cortico-cortical and cortico-thalamic) at the single axon level. Strong secondary interests have been cortical columnar organization and cortical cell types. In collaboration with colleagues at CSHL and MGH, she has participated in the development of cellular resolution imaging techniques. A current focus is the neurovascular unit in AD and mouse models of AD.

Recent Publications

For full list of publications click here.