Hebrew SeniorLife’s Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone Named Top 10 Neuroscientist by Research.com

Alvaro Pascual-Leone, M.D., Ph.D., Medical Director of the Deanna and Sidney Wolk Center for Memory Health and a Senior Scientist at the Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife, was ranked as the 10th most influential neuroscience researcher in the world, and 6th in the U.S., according to the first annual Ranking of Top 1,000 Scientists in the area of Neuroscience. The list was compiled by Research.com, a prominent academic platform for scientists. 

Dr. Pascual-Leone is also a Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School whose research focuses on how the brain controls various activities in humans, and how this can be modified to make the brain more adaptable and effective. He is a pioneer in the use of noninvasive brain stimulation and its application for the study of brain-behavior relations and the development of diagnostic and therapeutic interventions in neuropsychiatry. One of his overarching goals is to characterize and modulate brain activity to help patients overcome debilitating neuropsychiatric disorders, like dementia, and to promote brain health across the lifespan.

In addition to his research, Dr. Pascual-Leone also sees patients as a cognitive neurologist, delivering comprehensive, patient-centered, personalized care and multi-disciplinary, holistic support of individuals with cognitive decline, their families, and caregivers.

Research.com undertook a “meticulous examination of 166,880 scientists on Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Graph.” From a list of 9,233 neuroscience researchers, Dr. Pascual-Leone was selected based on the H-index, which measures both productivity – the quantity of research produced – and quality – the number of citations of that research in studies published by other researchers. The H-index data was gathered by Microsoft Academic on Dec. 6, 2021, including only prominent scientists with an H-index of at least 30 for scientific papers published in the field of Neuroscience. Dr. Pascual-Leone’s H-index score was a 185 based on 125,335 citations in 810 publications. In the broader field of medicine, his H-index was 155, with 94,154 citations in 754 publications, ranking him 336 in the world.

See the full Research.com rankings.

Research.com said it compiled its first annual ranking with the aim “to inspire scholars, entrepreneurs, and decision-makers worldwide to explore where leading experts are heading and to provide an opportunity for the entire scientific community to discover who the leading experts are in specific fields of research, in different countries, or even within research institutions.”

“The Research.com ranking is further validation of Dr. Pascual-Leone’s excellence in research and patient care, which joins his previous commendation by Thomson Reuters that named him one of the ‘World's Most Influential Scientific Minds,’” said Lewis Lipsitz, M.D., Director of the Marcus Institute for Aging Research and Chief Academic Officer at Hebrew SeniorLife. “We are proud of the research he does in the Marcus Institute and how the insights he gains help improve the care of patients throughout the world.”