Biographical Sketch
Dr. Xia joined the Department of Neurology in 2016 and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. He is a principal investigator in the Pittsburgh Institute for Multiple Sclerosis Care and Research and in the Pittsburgh Institute of Neurodegenerative Diseases. He is a board-certified neurologist with subspecialty expertise in neuroimmunology.
He received the Bachelor of Arts with a major in Biology from Swarthmore College and graduated from the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) at Case Western Reserve University where he earned dual graduate degrees: Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Philosophy in Neuroscience. He then completed a clinically rigorous Neurology residency at the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, obtained a post-graduate Master of Medical Science in Clinical Investigation at the Harvard Medical School, and finally finished a post-doctoral fellowship in translational genomics and neuroimmunology at the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Broad Institute of Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr. Xia’s clinical, translational, and computational research program lies at the intersection between data science and clinical neuroscience, centering on the field of clinical neuroimmunology and neurodegeneration. His research program has the overall mission to advance precision medicine for people living with chronic neurological disorders, particularly multiple sclerosis (MS) and related disorders as well as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementia. His research efforts address: (1) Which factors drive group and individual differences in disease onset, progression and treatment response? (2) How to provide more tailored clinical guidance? Applying the framework of population health to pragmatic real-world applications, his team harnesses multi-modal, longitudinally collected data and samples from participants and deploys a range of quantitative approaches (e.g., biostatistics, machine learning, advanced statistical learning, generative artificial intelligence) to gain insights into the underlying disease process and translate these findings into the clinical arena to improve brain health. Dr. Xia’s clinical and teaching endeavors complement his research program.
Dr. Xia's publications can be reviewed through the National Library of Medicine database and Google Scholar.
