Albert Gjedde

Albert Gjedde is a Danish neuroscientist. He is Professor of Neurobiology and Pharmacology at the Faculty of Health Sciences and Head of Department of Neuroscience and Pharmacology at the University of Copenhagen. He is currently also Adjunct Professor of Neuroscience at the Faculty of Health Sciences, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark, Adjunct Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery in the Department of Neurology, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and Adjunct Professor of Radiology and Radiological Science in the Division of Nuclear Medicine, Department of Radiology and Radiological Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.

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Academic positions

In Denmark, Albert Gjedde served on the Medical Research Council (FSS) and chaired the Research Advisory Committee of the Royal Library. He now serves on the official Danish Committee on Science Misconduct (UVVU). In the Nordic countries, he served on the coordinating committee of Nordic medical research councils (NOS-M). In Europe, he served on the standing committee of the European Medical Research Councils (EMRC) of the ESF and currently serves on the Program Committee of the Health aspects of the Seventh Framework (FP7) program of the European Union. He also serves on the Executive Committee of the European Dana Alliance for the Brain (EDAB) which is affiliated with the Dana Foundation. Albert Gjedde is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society of Canada, the American College of NeuropsychoPharmacology and the Academy of Europe.

Short Biography

Born in the Copenhagen suburb of Gentofte in 1946, Albert Gjedde spent time as an undergraduate student in Berkeley, California, USA (1964–65, 1968), Stellenbosch, Cape Province, South Africa (1968), and Lexington, Kentucky, USA (1969). Albert Gjedde received his M.D. and D.Sc. degrees from Copenhagen University in 1973 and 1983, respectively. He did postdoctoral work in the Neurology Department of the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center 1973-76 and held assistant and associate professorships in Medical Physiology at the University of Copenhagen 1976-1986.

As a junior investigator, Albert Gjedde worked as a visiting scientist at universities or research institutions in Lund, Sweden; Cologne, Leipzig, and Dresden, Germany; Paris, France; Szeged, Hungary; and Baltimore, MD, USA.

In 1986 he joined the McConnell Brain Imaging Center at McGill University in Montreal where he held the post of Director between 1989 and 1994.

As founder, Albert Gjedde headed the PET Center at Aarhus University Hospitals in Denmark during the years 1994 to 2008, and in this period he also founded the Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN) in 2001 and the Danish Neuroscience Center in 2008, both at Aarhus University.

Albert Gjedde joined the University of Copenhagen in 2008.

Research

Albert Gjedde’s research focuses on the relations between neuroplasticity and neurotransmission that can be revealed by mapping radioligand binding and the neuroplastic changes of brain functions. The investigations explore the relation between energy metabolism and neurotransmission by recording the changes of energy metabolism and consciousness under pharmacological and other manipulations. He uses PET to understand the synthesis of radioligand and tracer molecules that match the neurotransmitter molecules and the behavior of these transmitters under different functional conditions of the brain, normal as well as pathological, and the spatial and temporal relations among changes of cerebral blood flow, which is commonly used as a measure of brain work, and the cerebral oxygen consumption rate, which is the precise measure of this work. Albert Gjedde’s collaborations focus on experiments with volunteer subjects and patients that explore the lesions and degeneration of brain tissue in disorders such as epilepsy, ludomania, Parkinson's disease, stroke, depression, and somatizing disorders, as well as disorders related to addiction. Experiments explore the restructuring of neuronal networks that follows when sensory activity is processed by healthy subjects or volunteers suffering from inborn or acquired lesions.

In 1977, with Clifford Patlak, Albert Gjedde described the Gjedde-Patlak plot, also known as Multitime Graphical Analysis (MTGA), (Gjedde 1981, 1982, Patlak et al. 1983). The MTGA linearizes irreversible brain uptake of tracers in a manner that enables regression estimates to be made of uptake rates.

Noteworthy Publications

Selected highly cited original peer-reviewed publications:

Publication Statistics End of 2010

Books

See also

References

References to Gjedde-Patlak Plot