Dr. Arthur Toga is a distinguished leader in the field of computational neuroscience and neuroimaging who has significantly advanced the methodology of brain mapping over his four-decade career. He currently serves as Director of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI) and Director of the USC Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. Holding the prestigious Ghada Irani Chair in Neuroscience since 2016, he is also Provost Professor with appointments spanning Ophthalmology, Neurology, Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences, Radiology, and Biomedical Engineering. Prior to joining USC in 2013, Dr. Toga held numerous leadership positions at UCLA including Distinguished Professor of Neurology, David Geffen Chair in Informatics, and Assistant Dean of the David Geffen School of Medicine, building upon his earlier foundational work establishing the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at Washington University School of Medicine in 1983.
Dr. Toga's pioneering contributions include the development of multimodal imaging and data aggregation strategies that have revolutionized the study of brain structure and function across diverse neurological conditions. His laboratory has created some of the largest and most widely used databases and data mining tools that integrate genetics, imaging, clinical and behavioral data, supporting global research efforts in Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's, and Parkinson's disease. His work in developing three-dimensional digital neuroanatomic and functional atlases has enabled precise stereotactic localization and multisubject comparison, fundamentally changing how researchers analyze brain morphology across human populations and animal models. With over 1,000 published papers, chapters and abstracts including eight influential books, his methodological innovations in local deformation techniques for equating brain data sets across different modalities have become standard practice in the field of neuroimaging informatics.
As director of the 110-member Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, Dr. Toga has cultivated a uniquely interdisciplinary environment that bridges computer science, biostatistics, and neuroscience to advance the frontiers of brain mapping. His leadership extends to major international initiatives including the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative where his informatics expertise has been instrumental in creating standardized data collection protocols across multiple institutions. He continues to drive innovation in measuring dynamic brain changes during development, aging, and disease progression, with his laboratory's work increasingly focused on large-scale data integration and artificial intelligence applications for precision medicine in neurology. Under his guidance, the USC Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute has become a global hub for collaborative neuroscience research, training the next generation of computational neuroscientists while developing next-generation tools that continue to transform how researchers understand the human brain.
