Professor Cindy Weinstein was born and raised in Verona, New Jersey. She received her B.A. in English and American Literature from Brandeis University, after which she went to UC Berkeley for her Ph.D. in English. She is currently the Eli and Edythe Broad Professor of English, and has been at the California Institute of Technology since 1989, during which time she has published three monographs on American literature, edited several volumes, and taught classes on Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Women’s Fiction, and African-American literature. She has had several administrative roles at Caltech, including Vice Provost and Chief Diversity Officer. In 2018-19, she was an Atlantic Fellow in the Global Brain Health Institute based at UCSF and Trinity College Dublin, where she studied neurology with an interdisciplinary group of scientists, artists, social scientists, and physicians. During this time, she worked with Dr. Bruce Miller on Finding the Right Words.
Dr. Bruce Miller holds the A.W. and Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professorship in Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco where he directs the Memory and Aging Center. He is the principal investigator of the NIH-sponsored Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and program project on frontotemporal dementia, and he is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. As a behavioral neurologist whose work emphasizes brain-behavior relationships, he has reported on the emergence of artistic ability, personality, cognition, and emotion with the onset of neurodegenerative disease. Some of these findings have improved diagnostic accuracy, while others are leading to a deeper understanding of brain functional anatomy and disease risk. In 2015, partly in response to research findings showing that 30 to 40% of dementia cases could be eliminated with lifestyle changes, he helped found the Global Brain Health Institute and the Atlantic Fellows for Equity in Brain Health program, which he now co-directs.