David Irwin, MD

Dr. Irwin is a physician-scientist who completed undergraduate education at Drew University and medical school at Drexel College of Medicine in Philadelphia, where he also completed neurology residency as chief resident. He had postdoctoral training in neurodegeneration at Penn, where he also had clinical training in cognitive and behavioral neurology. He has the unique perspective of performing both detailed longitudinal clinical assessments in natural history studies, as well as postmortem examination of human brain tissue, in many of the same individual patients. Dr. Irwin co-directs the Penn Frontotemporal Degeneration Center and LBDA Research Center of Excellence at Penn. Dr. Irwin’s lab combines novel image analysis approaches with gold-standard histopathology and molecular techniques to integrate measures of postmortem neuropathology with antemortem biomarker data. The overall goal of this approach is to identify therapeutic targets and markers of disease progression that can serve as endpoints in treatment trials.