Allan Reiss

Allan Reiss, MD, Howard C. Robbins Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences; Professor, Department of Radiology; Director, Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research, Stanford University School of Medicine.

Research Description: Dr. Reiss is a distinguished investigator in neuropsychiatry, genetics, neuroimaging, neurodevelopment, and cognitive neuroscience, who uses an interdisciplinary, multi-level scientific approach to elucidate neurobiological pathways that lead to both typical and atypical behavioral and cognitive outcomes in children and adolescents. He has led multiple longitudinal studies of early brain development in children with medical and genetic risk factors, or diseases like diabetes. His activities as a member of SDRC include work on the neurodevelopmental effects of early-onset diabetes in children. He has helped establish a multi-institution consortium (DirecNet) for these studies renowned for its cohesiveness, productivity and effectiveness. As director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research, he has introduced a wide range of expertise in all aspects of multi-modal pediatric neuroimaging including subject preparation, scan acquisition and image analysis. His lab was one of the first to use neuroimaging to illuminate neural correlates of behavioral neurogenetic and medical conditions. Studies of brain anatomy, white matter, function and neurometabolites have contributed significantly to our understanding of the brain as an intermediate phenotype that mediates the interaction of genetic risk and environment influences on cognitive-behavioral outcome. An important focus of this research has been on medical risk factors in childhood and adolescence, particularly childhood-onset Type 1 diabetes.

Selected relevant publications (Stanford DRC members in BOLD):

  1. Foland-Ross LC, Tong G, Mauras N, Cato A, Aye T, Tansey M, White NH, Weinzimer SA, Englert K, Shen H, Mazaika PK, Reiss AL; Diabetes Research in Children Network (DirecNet). Brain Function Differences in Children With Type 1 Diabetes: A Functional MRI Study of Working Memory. Diabetes. 2020 Aug;69(8):1770-1778. doi: 10.2337/db20-0123. PMID: 32471809; PMCID: PMC7372069. 

  2. Mazaika PK, Marzelli M, Tong G, Foland-Ross LC, Buckingham BA, Aye T, Reiss AL. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy detects increased activation of the brain frontal-parietal network in youth with type 1 diabetes. Pediatr Diabetes. 2020 May;21(3):515-523. doi: 10.1111/pedi.12992. PMID: 32003523. 

  3. Foland-Ross LC, Buckingam B, Mauras N, Arbelaez AM, Tamborlane WV, Tsalikian E, Cato A, Tong G, Englert K, Mazaika PK, Reiss AL; Diabetes Research in Children Network (DirecNet). Executive task-based brain function in children with type 1 diabetes: An observational study. PLoS Med. 2019 Dec 9;16(12):e1002979. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1002979. PMID: 31815939; PMCID: PMC6901178.