Dr. Rebecca Gottesman is currently Stroke Branch Chief and Senior Investigator of the Stroke, Cognition, And Neuroepidemiology (SCAN) section at the NINDS Intramural research program at the NIH. Before coming to the NINDS in 2021, she was Professor of Neurology and Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she maintains an adjunct faculty appointment. Dr. Gottesman completed her undergraduate and medical training at Columbia University, and her internship and neurology residency, as well as Vascular neurology fellowship at Johns Hopkins. She completed a PhD in Clinical Investigation at the Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and her research focuses on the vascular contributions to cognitive impairment, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as on cerebral small vessel disease and post-stroke dementia. She primarily studies large epidemiologic cohorts, and uses neuroimaging to evaluate mechanism related to these research questions. Her research focuses on questions relating to modifiable risk factors for dementia but also with specific consideration of the life course, and her work also explores health disparities in stroke and dementia. She is a former Associate Editor for the journal Neurology, won the 2019 Outstanding Stroke Research Mentor award from the American Heart Association (AHA), and has been a member of various NIH and AHA study sections.