Donald J. Hagler, Jr., Ph.D., is an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Department of Radiology at UCSD. Dr. Hagler received his Ph.D. from the Department of Biology at UCSD, after having studied the molecular and electrophysiological bases of synaptic transmission and plasticity. He completed a post-doctoral research fellowship in the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD, studying visual maps in higher level cortical areas related to attention and executive control. Dr. Hagler served as an Assistant Project Scientist in the Department of Radiology at UCSD from 2007-2009 and joined the faculty as Assistant Adjunct Professor in 2009. Since 2006, Dr. Hagler has also been a member of the Multimodal Imaging Laboratory, an interdisciplinary group of scientists and clinicians who study the brain using a variety of imaging, recording and computational techniques. Dr. Hagler serves as the lead developer of a software package for the automated processing of multimodal brain imaging data, called the Multimodal Processing Stream.

Dr. Hagler has authored 48 peer-reviewed articles on topics including synaptic transmission, visual maps in higher level cortical areas, visual evoked responses, white matter segmentation, and functional and structural differences related to Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, aging, development. Dr. Hagler’s primary interest is in studying the biological bases of brain function, particularly in how cortical areas interact to perform functions such as visual perception and the control of attention. His work as a post-doctoral fellow provided the first demonstration of maps of visual space in frontal and prefrontal cortex and identified previously unidentified maps in parietal cortex. He recently developed a novel method for the estimation of time courses of visual evoked responses in individual visual areas, providing the means to study the temporal dynamics of visual processing with high temporal resolution and spatial precision. He also developed a probabilistic atlas-based method for automated segmentation of white matter fiber tracts that is used to study the structural properties of the connections between brain areas.