Jonathan Rosand

Jonathan Rosand is Co-Founder and Managing Co-Director of the Henry and Allison McCance Center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he is appointed to the J. Philip Kistler (VP&S’64) Endowed Chair in Neurology. Professor of Neurology at Harvard, Jonathan also serves as Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. An internationally renowned scientist, clinician, educator and innovative leader, he has created a legacy of multidisciplinary teams that are successfully tackling some of the most pressing challenges in brain disease.

The author of more than 300 scientific publications, Rosand, with his program in cerebrovascular health, conducts research in partnership with thousands of volunteer patients and families to prevent strokes and improve recovery from stroke and other brain injuries. Their focus is discovering the role of genetics and using those discoveries to speed the development of new treatments. The lab is a leading contributor to the performance and analysis of high-throughput genome-wide association and sequencing studies in stroke and related traits. In order to accelerate these discoveries, Jonathan founded the International Stroke Genetics Consortium to bring together the world’s pre-eminent stroke investigators, and launched the NIH-funded Platform for Accelerating Genetic Discovery for Cerebrovascular Disease to share data widely. The Consortium is now composed of more than 100 investigators from six continents who work collaboratively on an unprecedented scale and publish their work in the world’s leading journals.

Jonathan has trained a generation of national leaders in neurocritical care, stroke and clinical investigation. He served as Program Director for Harvard’s clinical training programs in both stroke and neurocritical care and is Principal Investigator of the NIH training program entitled Recovery and Restoration of Central Nervous System Health and Function After Injury. His own lab has been the training ground for outstanding investigators who have gone on to establish independent research programs at top academic institutions in the US and abroad.

After founding Mass General’s Division of Neurocritical Care, recruiting and mentoring a dozen faculty, and building it into the nation’s top program, Jonathan stepped down to establish the McCance Center for Brain Health with colleagues from neuroscience and psychiatry. The Center’s singular goal is to bring primary prevention to brain health. The McCance Center team is focused on identifying the fundamental tools necessary for monitoring brain health from conception to advanced age, catalyzing the development of treatments that protect the brain and integrating these tools and treatments into primary care.

With his brother Eric (Law’95), Jonathan was raised in New York City and Venice, Italy in a family devoted to passionate scholarship and teaching in the humanities. His mother is the George Saden Professor Emerita of Music at Yale. His father was Columbia Art Historian, David Rosand (CC’59, PhD’65, HON’14). After graduating from Columbia College with a degree in Greek and Latin, Jonathan earned his medical degree, Alpha Omega Alpha, from the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. He then completed his internship, residency, chief residency, and clinical and research fellowships at Mass General and the Harvard School of Public Health. Jonathan and his wife Judy Polacheck (Law’94) have two adult children.

Jonathan serves on the VP&S and Columbia University Irving Medical Center Board of Advisors, the Advisory Council of Columbia’s Department of Art History and Archaeology, and the selection committee of the Andrew Mark Lippard Memorial Lecture series at VP&S, established in memory of his childhood friend who died at the age of seven from acute brain swelling. The Rosand family and their friends endowed the David Rosand Professorship of Italian Renaissance Art History and continue to play leading roles in supporting Casa Muraro, Columbia’s Study Center in Venice, Italy.