Faculty Feature: Alice Cronin-Golomb

Dr. Cronin-Golomb is a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at Boston University for the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, a Core Faculty member for the Center for Brain Recovery, and the Director of the Vision & Cognition Laboratory.

Q&A with Alice Cronin-Golomb, PhD

What is your current research focus, and how does it align with the Center for Brain Recovery’s mission?

My principal research focus is on perception, cognition, motor function, mood, sleep, and other aspects of daily function in aging and age-related neurodegenerative disease. My main methodology is behavioral and includes cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychological assessment, neuroimaging, and visual psychophysics. A main emphasis of my Vision and Cognition Lab is on the non-motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and their interaction with motor symptoms. I also have a long-standing interest in perception and cognition in Alzheimer’s disease and healthy aging and actively collaborate on projects in these areas. Our engagement in basic research and development of interventions to enhance quality of life in persons with compromised brain function aligns very well with CBR’s mission.

How did you initially become involved and/or interested in your field?

I was a first-generation college student at Wesleyan University, a biology major on a pre-med track almost by default. I didn’t even know what graduate school was. Then I discovered a course called Brain Mechanisms of Learning and the scales fell from my eyes. This was exactly what I wanted to do. With supportive faculty I figured out how to apply to graduate school and get into this field. I’ve never regretted it!

What brought you to Boston University?

My postdoc in behavioral neuroscience was at MIT, and my husband had just gotten a faculty position at Tufts, so we were trying to solve the 2-body problem. A faculty position in clinical neuropsychology opened at BU and he dared me to apply for it even though I wasn’t a clinical psychologist (my degree being in Psychobiology at Caltech). Dare accepted. I am a faculty member in two programs within our department, Clinical and Brain, Behavior, and Cognition, and it’s been a wonderful fit for me.

What courses do you teach?

I teach undergraduate Neuropsychology (PS/NE338) and graduate Principles of Neuropsychology (PS829). The courses are taught at different levels and have different requirements but both focus on neuropsychology as the study of the relation of brain and behavior. We cover structure (including anatomy) and function in healthy and disordered brain states.

What research are you most proud of?

I’m going to give you two. First was our earlier work on basic vision in Alzheimer’s disease and how it affects cognition. I’m proud of that because sensory deficits often are fixable, whereas cognitive problems often are not. If one reason you seem to have cognitive problems (e.g., memory loss) is because you didn’t encode information properly because of visual or hearing deficits, then your “memory” problem might actually be reduced if you clean up your sensory function. That’s really important! Second, we have done a lot of work on the non-motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD) (for example, cognition, depression, anxiety, sleep disruption, autonomic dysfunction), which is something that many people don’t think about because they are so focused on the motor symptoms, but these non-motor symptoms are very distressing. Early on, we demonstrated a clear and specific deficit in visuospatial dysfunction in PD, before anyone else had, and more recently we have focused on psychological interventions for non-motor symptoms, including cognitive-behavioral therapy. People with PD tell us how important treating these symptoms is to them so I’m proud of that too, and proud of my students for coming up with these treatments.

What do you consider the most pressing challenge in your field today, and how is your research addressing this challenge?

It is all about early detection of neurodegenerative conditions, before symptoms begin to manifest themselves. In my collaboration with Dr. Yakeel Quiroz on Alzheimer’s disease, we are examining preclinical biomarkers (e.g., blood, neuroimaging) and cognitive markers in people with a mutation that gives them AD at a relatively young age. We can compare carriers vs non-carriers of the mutation for the biomarkers and for their performance on very sensitive cognitive and behavioral tests that we are developing. In my collaboration with BU faculty in Physical Therapy (Sargent) and Biomedical Engineering on Parkinson’s disease, we are using functional near-infrared spectroscopy to reveal brain activation patterns that may differ between people who have subjective cognitive concerns (who feel they are slipping cognitively, though standard tests do not pick that up) and those without such concerns. If we can succeed in early detection, interventions have a better chance of working.

If you could give one piece of advice to someone just starting out in your field, what would it be?

Train broadly as well as deeply and if you want to do something, go for it. Don’t be put off by a job description for which you are not a perfect match—you may in fact be perfect for that position anyway (as I have found out myself). Also, there is no single right path- there are many. If one path is blocked, take another, which may present new and exciting opportunities that you had not considered before. (OK, so that’s more than one piece of advice).

What is something unique about you that people might not know?

Every January I go to Florida to play baseball with the Red Sox Women’s Fantasy Camp, with our coaches being former players (many from the 2004 championship team). I’ve done this with my sister all four years and the last two years I also brought my daughters. Of course I have signed up for year 5 in January 2026. It is the best time ever!

Is there any additional information you would like to share with the CBR community?

None of what I do would be possible without my incredible lab group of doctoral, MA, and undergraduate students. They are great researchers and fantastic people. And we are really grateful to our research participants.

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