Alzheimer’s Now: Josh Kornbluth, Dr. Bruce Miller

Show Summary: Dementia statistics are daunting. One in three seniors dies with Alzheimers or other dementia; every 66 seconds someone in the US develops the disease. Monologist Josh Kornbluth has immersed himself in this realm, and incorporates his experience in “Josh’s Brain Improvs”, a coproduction with The Marsh theater in San Francisco.     Kornbluth bases his series of improvisations on his experiences working at the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and his work as an artist-in-residence and volunteer at the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco.     Josh Kornbluth has performed autobiographical one-man shows since 1987 — The San Francisco Chronicle declared, Kornbluth takes a world we ignore, or barely observe, and brings it into brilliant comic relief.

     Dr. Bruce Miller holds the A.W. and Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professorship in Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He directs the busy UCSF dementia center where patients in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond receive comprehensive clinical evaluations. His goal is the delivery of model care to all of the patients who enter the clinical and research programs at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center (MAC).>     Dr. Miller is a behavioral neurologist focused on dementia with special interests in brain and behavior relationships as well as the genetic and molecular underpinnings of disease. His work in frontotemporal dementia (FTD) emphasizes both the behavioral and emotional deficits that characterize these patients, while simultaneously noting the visual creativity that can emerge in the setting of FTD. He is the principal investigator of the NIH-sponsored Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) and program project on FTD called Frontotemporal Dementia: Genes, Imaging and Emotions. He oversees a healthy aging program, which includes an artist in residence program. In addition, he helps lead two philanthropy-funded research consortia, the Tau Consortium and Consortium for Frontotemporal Research, focused on developing treatments for tau and progranulin disorders, respectively. Also, he is the Co-Director of the Global Brain Health Institute. Dr. Miller teaches extensively, runs the Behavioral Neurology Fellowship at UCSF, and oversees visits of more than 50 foreign scholars every year.