Dr. Scharre received his medical degree from Georgetown University and completed his neurology residency at Letterman Army medical Center in San Francisco. After completing a Neurobehavior fellowship at UCLA, he joined the OSU faculty in the Department of Neurology in 1993. Dr. Scharre is a board-certified neurologist with special interests in dementia-related behaviors and degenerative dementias.

Dr. Scharre's conducts clinical research in dementia and mild cognitive impairment that have been funded by NIH, foundations, and industry. He has many active grants including clinical drug trials using cognitive enhancers and behavioral therapies, functional neuroimaging studies using SPECT and MRI, and screening for mild cognitive impairment and early dementia diagnosis. He has published journal papers, book chapters, and abstracts in the area of cognitive neurology including dementia, Alzheimer's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, chorea-acanthocytosis, frontal lobe disorders, inherited neurologic disorders, visual agnosia, and optic aphasia. He has published on the neuropsychiatric aspects of neoplastic, demyelinating, infectious, and inflammatory diseases of the brain, on biomarkers in Alzheimer's disease including beta-amyloid protein and tau protein, on functional neuroimaging with SPECT scanning, and on treatment of behavioral disturbances in dementia. He lectures frequently on topics of dementia, Alzheimer's disease, behavioral management of dementia, and other aspects of cognitive neurology.