Employment History:
Associate Professor, Touro College, Manhattan

Published Works:

Public Speaking Experience:

Why F is an Expert:
My expertise is in brain-behavior relationships and personalized medicine. What I can do is go beyond traditional medicine and test to see if certain drugs are working on the brain. I test to see if they are affecting attention positively or other parameters. For people who say, “I don’t think the medicine is doing anything,” or “Maybe I need something else,” I can do a pre/post test. I can show them exactly what areas [the medicine is affecting]; maybe it’s auditory, maybe it’s visual, and that it’s actually helping them. A great deal of the time, parents don’t necessarily want to medicate their children but it’s really helpful if they would. I [am able to offer] them concrete proof, so the forging of that area of personalized medicine and brain-behavior relationships is my biggest area.

Best Advice:
Never give up. Keep trying to push the envelope, do more cutting edge work, look to the future, and don’t be satisfied with what you’ve achieved.

Passionate about:

Biography Excerpt:
When Margaret Alvarez was a child, she imagined herself growing up to be a musician. However, although she enjoyed playing the piano, her independent style didn’t jibe with the regimented music school standards where she auditioned, a lesson she took to heart. Today, Dr. Alvarez continues to be a maverick, and is often found pushing the boundaries of her field.

     

Cambridge Who's Who: What is your greatest professional accomplishment to date?  
DR. MARGARET B. ALVAREZ :  Balancing it all, that’s a big part of it. Professionally, it’s like I just don’t stop going. I am continually curious and interested in finding out what the next step is and where the answer will lead, such as when I studied for my doctorate in psychology at Yeshiva and then said, “Gee, there’s something more that I’m not getting here.” And I ended up going on to do the post-doctorate in neuropsychology and study with Elkhonon Goldberg, the foremost frontal lobe theorist internationally. Seeing that I could be on par with these people and develop my skills to that level was an accomplishment – realizing that I knew all the anatomical pieces and the structure of the brain, but I really didn’t know enough about the chemical makeup. I went into psycho-pharmacology to really learn that. Then, upon finding that in New York I can’t practice or prescribe medicine, I entered medical school. It’s almost working backwards.

How do you remain current in your profession?
I’m constantly reading. I have a lot of online journals and websites that are sent to me. I follow discussion threads, listservs in pediatric neuropsychology, psycho-pharmacology, medical student discussions, and medical updates. I look at the news that’s just breaking from the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and the NIH [National Institutes of Health]. I read Science magazine and Nature; they’re always on the cutting edge. I have my kids reading The Wall Street Journal now. My husband asked our two youngest daughters to pick out an article a day so they could talk to him about it.

What are your short-term and long-term career goals?
The short-term goal would be to really perfect my clinic to get it as user-friendly as possible. I would like to have it work more like a machine where I can have things automated. I perform a lot of computerized testing so I want to set up a room where I have all of that together. I currently have a small computer lab, but I want to get a much larger computer lab so that I can help more people at the same time. In the long run, I want to get my MD and go from there. I did this backward; I got my specialization in neuropharmacology and neuropsychology without getting the medical school foundation. So, now I’m completing that part of it.