Leonard F M Scinto

Leonard Scinto was born in Connecticut and grew up in Europe, Southeast Asia and the United States. He attended Harvard University and Cambridge University. His studies were in Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience. After graduating from Cambridge he held a fellowship at the Center for Psychosocial Studies in Chicago. After he left his fellowship he taught at Northwestern University before taking up the post of Vice-President for Research at Applied Sciences Laboratories, a bio-engineering firm outside of Boston – leaving in 1980 to return to research and teaching at Harvard University.

He held medical staff appoints at Beth Israel and Brigham and Women’s Hospitals, Boston, in Neurology and Psychiatry. He was co-founder and co-director of the Brigham Behavioral Neurology Group and the Laboratory of Higher Cortical Functions. He was until 2008 Assistant Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School. He left his Harvard and hospital appointments in 2008 to found Cambridge Neurodiagnostics, LTD in order to commercialize his work on an early non-invasive diagnostic for Alzheimer’s disease.

He is the author of numerous articles on degenerative disease, aging, and attention. Whilst at Brigham and Women’s Hospital he was principal investigator for many clinical trials in Alzheimer’s therapeutics. He edited and co-authored the definitive book on early diagnosis in Alzheimer’s disease.
Whilst at Harvard and Brigham and Women’s Hospital his research explored fundamental brain behavior mappings in healthy and compromised individuals in order to gain an understanding of the biological underpinnings of higher cortical functions such as cognition, memory and especially attention.  A major focus of this work has been in the area of aging and degenerative disease which grows out of a lifelong interest in Human development and the development of mind and brain across the life span.  He has spearheaded research efforts in both fundamental and more applied clinical trial research in these domains (e.g. Drug and diagnostic studies in degenerative disease).  One focus of his research was with postmortem neuroanatomical and neurochemical protocols and where he established an active bench program exploring the basis for selective cell vulnerability in aging and degenerative disease collaboration with colleagues at the Harvard Institutes of Medicine.
Scinto’s work has resulted in the development of a pupil based assay for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease His work has also explored fundamental mechanisms for autonomic nervous system hypersensitivity in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and in normal community dwelling elderly individuals as well as disruptions of complex attention in Alzheimer disease and normal aging and the anatomical basis for such disruptions.
His Neuropathological studies focused on charting the effect of normal aging on the loss of neurons and connectivity in frontal cortex compared to other cortical areas and its effect on attention in the elderly He has explored age related changes in cognition and memory in high functioning elders, investigations of the neurochemical basis for early cell death in tau based neurodegenerative conditions.
He lives in Cambridge with his wife Janet. He was a keen sailor and squash player for many years. His current interests include collecting rare books and he has formed a significant collection of 16th century Italian drama. He enjoys listening to opera and travel.
Supervisors: David Bruce - Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and Marsell Mesulam, Brigham & Women's Hospital, Boston