Medical Visionary Award

John C. Mazziotta, MD, PhD

Dr. John Mazziotta is Vice Chancellor of UCLA Health Sciences and CEO of UCLA Health. From 2012 until 2015 he was Associate Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences and Executive Vice Dean of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Dr. Mazziotta was Chair of the Department of Neurology, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA from 2002 to 2015, and Founding Director of the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center. After receiving his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Columbia University in 1972, he obtained an M.D. and Ph.D. in Neuroanatomy from Georgetown University in 1977. Following an internship at Georgetown, he completed Neurology and Nuclear Medicine training at UCLA and joined the faculty here in 1983.

When he was chair of one of the nation’s largest Neurology departments, Dr. Mazziotta focused the department’s efforts on research and for nine consecutive years achieved the distinguished position of being first in National Institutes of Health (NIH) research funding. An expert in brain imaging, he established the Brain Mapping Center at UCLA that includes all of the methods available to study human brain structure and function. He was the principal investigator of the International Consortium for Brain Mapping, the goal of which was to develop the first atlas of the human brain including behavioral, demographic, imaging, and genetic data from thousands of normal human subjects.

Since beginning this work, Dr. Mazziotta has published more than 255 research papers and eight texts. He has received numerous awards and honors, including the Oldendorf Award from the American Society of Neuroimaging, the S. Weir Mitchell Award and the Wartenberg Prize of the American Academy of Neurology, the Von Hevesy Prize from the International Society of Nuclear Medicine, the 1996 Medical Science Award from the UCLA Medical Alumni Association, election to the National Academy of Medicine, Honorary Doctorate from l’Université de Caen and membership in the Royal College of Physicians.

In 2012, Dr. Mazziotta was appointed Associate Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences and Executive Vice Dean of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. In March, 2015, Dr. Mazziotta was appointed vice chancellor of UCLA Health Sciences and dean of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. In September 2015, Dr. Mazziotta became Vice Chancellor, UCLA Health Sciences and CEO, UCLA Health.