Top neurologists in California 2026

Jeffrey Saver, MD, is Distinguished Professor and Director of the UCLA Comprehensive Stroke and Vascular Neurology Program at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he holds the Carol and James Collins Chair in the Department of Neurology. His clinical practice is built entirely around ischemic stroke: preventing it, treating it in the acute window, and limiting the neurological damage it causes.

His 2005 paper "Time Is Brain—Quantified" put a specific number to something stroke specialists had said for years: every minute an ischemic stroke goes untreated, the brain loses roughly 1.9 million neurons ¹. That calculation became the scientific basis for the speed-based protocols now used in every certified stroke center. He also led the RESPECT trial, which followed patients with cryptogenic stroke and a patent foramen ovale (a small hole in the heart present from birth) and found that surgically closing the PFO was associated with fewer recurrent strokes than medication alone over extended follow-up ². If you have had a stroke with no clear cause and been told you have a PFO, that finding is directly relevant to your treatment conversation.

Douglas Goodin, MD, is Professor in Residence of Neurology at UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco. His career has focused on multiple sclerosis: its natural history, MRI-based diagnosis, and the evidence base for disease-modifying therapies.

Dr. Goodin co-authored the American Academy of Neurology's foundational MS disease-modifying therapy guidelines, which organized the clinical evidence on interferons, glatiramer acetate, and other treatments into the framework neurologists still use ⁴. He contributed to the FREEDOMS II trial, a phase 3 placebo-controlled study of fingolimod in relapsing-remitting MS that established the drug's efficacy across clinical and imaging endpoints ³. His 2008 Neurology paper on incidental MRI findings is also widely cited: it showed that patients with white matter lesions "highly suggestive" of demyelination face a meaningful risk of later developing clinically definite MS, which matters practically for patients who have been told their MRI result is ambiguous ⁵.

Gil Rabinovici, MD, is Professor of Neurology and the Edward and Pearl Fein Distinguished Professor in Memory and Aging at UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco. His clinical work covers Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal dementia, and the neuroimaging tools used to tell them apart, particularly amyloid PET and tau PET scans.

Dr. Rabinovici led the IDEAS study, a large Medicare-funded trial that asked a specific practical question: does amyloid PET scanning actually change how dementia patients are managed? The 2019 JAMA paper from that study found that for Medicare patients with mild cognitive impairment or uncertain dementia, amyloid PET changed the diagnosis or treatment plan in more than 60 percent of cases ⁶. That result contributed directly to Medicare's decision to expand coverage for amyloid PET. His 2021 Nature Medicine paper identified four distinct patterns of tau buildup across 1,612 Alzheimer's patients, each correlating with a different clinical presentation and rate of decline ⁷. The finding challenged the assumption that Alzheimer's follows a single predictable course. For families trying to understand why two people with the same diagnosis look so different from each other, this research is part of the answer.

Kimford Meador, MD, is Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences and Clinical Director of the Stanford Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at Stanford Health Care. His clinical focus covers epilepsy broadly, but he has done some of his most consequential work on two populations that are often underserved in epilepsy research: people with epilepsy and depression, and women with epilepsy who are pregnant or considering pregnancy.

Dr. Meador's 2006 Lancet Neurology multicenter study developed and validated the Neurological Disorders Depression Inventory for Epilepsy (NDDI-E), a brief screening tool that detects major depression in epilepsy patients in about three minutes ⁸. Depression affects roughly a third of people with epilepsy and is frequently missed in busy neurology clinics; the NDDI-E was designed to close that gap. For women with epilepsy, his systematic review and meta-analysis of pregnancy outcomes across published registries remains a primary reference for counseling patients about medication risks during pregnancy, including which anti-seizure drugs carry the highest teratogenic risk ⁹. If you are a woman with epilepsy who is pregnant or planning to become pregnant, that body of work is part of why current guidance exists.

Bruce Cree, M.D., is Professor of Clinical Neurology and George A. Zimmermann Endowed Professor in Multiple Sclerosis at UCSF Medical Center, where he is also Clinical Research Director of the UCSF Multiple Sclerosis Center. His research spans MS immunology, microbiome connections to MS, and newer therapies for neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder.

Before rituximab was widely used in MS-related conditions, Dr. Cree ran one of the earliest open-label trials in neuromyelitis optica (NMO), an autoimmune condition frequently misdiagnosed as MS. His 2005 paper in Neurology reported that six of eight NMO patients treated with rituximab were relapse-free at follow-up, with median attack rates dropping from 2.6 per year to zero. That result helped establish B-cell depletion as the standard approach for NMO ¹⁰. More recently he led the ReBUILD trial, published in The Lancet, which tested clemastine fumarate (an old antihistamine) as a remyelinating agent in MS patients with chronic optic nerve damage. The trial found meaningful improvement in visual nerve conduction speed, making it the first positive remyelination trial ever completed in MS ¹¹. For patients who are already on immunosuppressive therapy but still losing neurological function, the goal of actual repair is what that research is working toward.

Gregory Albers, MD, is Coyote Foundation Professor and Director of the Stanford Stroke Center at Stanford Health Care, where he also holds a courtesy appointment in neurosurgery. His research has concentrated on a single question: how long after stroke onset can patients still benefit from treatment, and who can we prove it for?

Dr. Albers led the SWIFT PRIME trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015, which showed that adding mechanical thrombectomy (physically removing a clot with a stent-retriever device) to standard tPA treatment dramatically improved functional outcomes at 90 days compared with tPA alone ¹³. That trial was one of five published within months of each other that rewrote the standard of care for large-vessel ischemic stroke. He then led the DEFUSE 3 trial, which extended thrombectomy eligibility out to 6 to 16 hours after a patient was last known to be well, using perfusion imaging to identify brain tissue that was ischemic but not yet dead ¹⁴. That matters because a significant number of stroke patients wake up having had the stroke overnight, or arrive at a hospital many hours after onset. DEFUSE 3 showed those patients could still benefit from clot removal. If you or someone in your family has had a large-vessel stroke, Dr. Albers' practice at the Stanford Stroke Center covers the acute decisions and the imaging-guided selection protocols that his trials helped put into practice.