William Seeley, MD

Dr. Seeley attended medical school at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine, where he first encountered patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in 1999, during a research elective with Dr. Bruce Miller. He completed a neurology residency at Harvard Medical School, training at the Massachusetts General and Brigham & Women's Hospitals. Returning to UCSF for a Behavioral Neurology fellowship, Dr. Seeley developed expertise in the differential diagnosis and treatment of patients with neurodegenerative disease. Struck by the focality of these illnesses, he began to question how events at the molecular level could target small subsets of the brain's roughly 86 billion neurons. This biological problem, referred to as selective vulnerability, has become the primary focus of Dr. Seeley’s research. He addresses this question through behavioral, functional imaging and neuropathological studies. The goal of his research is to determine what makes brain tissues susceptible or resistant to disease, with an eye toward translating these findings into novel treatment approaches.

He is a Professor of Neurology and Pathology at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and holds the Zander Family Distinguished Professor in Neurology. He is also the Director of the UCSF Neurodegenerative Disease Brain Bank.