Event Details:
The first Monday of each month, the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience will host monthly seminars to bring together awardees, affiliated professors and students for a series of 'lab meeting' styled talks. Two speakers will discuss their brain resilience research, experiences in the field, and answer questions about their work.
To support our researchers' participation in this open science ‘lab-meeting style’ exchange of ideas, these seminars are not streamed/recorded and are only open to members of the Stanford community.
Hannah Ennerfelt, Stanford University
Peripheral immune drivers of cognitive decline in aging and Alzheimer's disease
During aging and Alzheimer’s disease, certain inflammatory responses regulated by the immune system further exacerbate the disease and contribute to impaired cognition and memory. Our study focuses on delineating the machinery necessary for immune cells to amplify damaging inflammation in the body and, ultimately, the brain. Using a novel method to target a specific immune cell mechanism in peripheral immune cells, we assess how impeding its associated inflammatory pathways can curb cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s progression.
Jintao Sheng, Stanford University
Top-down attention and Alzheimer’s pathology impact cortical selectivity during learning, influencing episodic memory in older adults
We are studying how aging affects the brain’s ability to form and retrieve memories, with the goal of understanding why memory often declines in later life and how this process may be related to the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s disease. While occasional forgetfulness is a normal part of aging, some individuals experience more significant memory loss that could signal changes in brain health long before clinical symptoms appear. Identifying these early changes is key to developing strategies to prevent or delay disease progression.
Our research uses a combination of advanced brain imaging techniques—such as high-resolution structural and functional MRI, PET scans—to examine how brain activity patterns support memory in healthy older adults. We are particularly interested in how the brain represents information during learning and how these representations vary across individuals. In our recent work, we found that older adults who show stronger and more distinct brain activity patterns during memory tasks tend to remember information better. We also study how these brain patterns relate to the build-up of Alzheimer's-related proteins, such as amyloid and tau, even before symptoms occur.
By combining brain imaging with computational and statistical tools, we aim to uncover the neural mechanisms that protect memory and identify individuals at risk for decline. Our long-term goal is to help develop early interventions—before irreversible damage occurs—that promote healthy brain aging and prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
