Dr. Michael D. Geschwind is a neurologist at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center who specializes in assessing and treating rapidly progressive dementias, including prion diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. He helped establish a hospital program for the assessment of rapidly progressive dementias at UCSF Medical Center, the first of its kind in the country. He also helped establish a clinic for patients with autoimmune encephalopathies, or brain diseases resulting from attack by the patient's own immune system.
In his research, Geschwind studies cognitive dysfunction in movement disorders, such as Huntington's disease, corticobasal degeneration, progressive supranuclear palsy and other parkinsonian dementias.
Geschwind earned his medical degree and doctoral degree in neuroscience through the Medical Scientist Training Program, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. He completed an internship in internal medicine at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, a neurology residency at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a fellowship in behavioral neurology at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center. At UCSF School of Medicine, he is the Michael J. Homer Chair in Neurology.