Dr. Black is a movement disorders-trained neuropsychiatrist who has cared for individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) in the Washington University Movement Disorders Center for the past 23 years. He has been a site Principal Investigator (PI) for several clinical trials in PD and holds an investigational new drug application (NDA) for intravenous (IV) levodopa.

For more than 20 years, Dr. Black has been involved in extending dose-response measurements of brain pharmacology through in vivo brain imaging. He was the PI for the single-site study that produced the first human clinical and neuroimaging data on the adenosine A2a antagonist tozadenant (SYN115) in PD, which was also the first published human pharmacological functional magnetic resonance imaging study of any drug candidate developed for clinical use. In a separate line of research, the Black lab developed and patented a novel technique for rapid quantitative pharmacodynamic brain imaging. The current proposal applies that line of work to levodopa pharmacology in PD.