Andreana Benitez, Ph.D. is a clinical neuropsychologist and an Associate Professor of Neurology at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, South Carolina. Dr. Benitez received her master’s and doctoral degrees in Clinical Psychology with specializations in Assessment and Clinical Neuropsychology from Kent State University, OH. She was a neuropsychology pre-doctoral intern at the Charleston Consortium prior to joining the post-doctoral fellowship program in clinical neuropsychology at UCLA, where she was the Neurology of Aging fellow at the Department of Neurology and Easton Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research. She joined MUSC in 2011 as post-doctoral research fellow to Dr. Joseph Helpern, Director of the Center for Biomedical Imaging.
In 2013 Dr. Benitez became an Assistant Professor and was awarded a KL2 career development award from the South Carolina Clinical and Translational Research Institute. Dr. Benitez’s research aims to characterize cognitive aging and to detect early signs of neurodegenerative disease, particularly Alzheimer’s disease and Vascular Cognitive Impairment, using neuroimaging, neuropsychological and advanced psychometric methods. She has particular interest in diffusion MRI and biophysical modeling of diffusional kurtosis imaging parameters to quantify tissue-specific brain changes associated with aging and disease.