Professor Michael Woodward is Head of Dementia Research and a senior clinician in the Memory Clinic at Austin Health in Melbourne, Victoria. He is a specialist in geriatric medicine with major interests in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other dementias, and Principal Investigator for numerous research trials of new therapies for cognitive disorders. He is Past President of the AC4R – the Australasian Consortium of Centres for Clinical Cognitive Research that brings together researchers into therapeutic agents for dementia (now called Dementia Trials Australia). He was a member of the Alzheimer’s Australia Vic Board, then their chief medical advisor and chaired their research foundation, and now is a Board member of the national Dementia Australia Research Foundation, as well as one of the Honorary Medical Advisors to Dementia Australia.
His MD investigated the overlap between the dementia syndromes and how memory clinic data bases contribute to our understanding of the dementias. Recent research interests have focussed on characterizing the frontal (dysexecutive) variant of Alzheimer’s disease. He is a Fellow of the Australian Association of Gerontology (AAG), the Australian and New Zealand Society for Geriatric Medicine (ANZSGM) and the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP) and was President of AAG (Vic) for 6 years. He was vice then for 6 years Chair of the Committee for Physician Training that oversaw the training of all RACP trainees, and recently Chaired the Accreditation Committee of that College, responsible for accrediting all Australian Basic Physician Training sites in adult medicine.