Funded Projects

This team aims to be the first to study the cellular and molecular impact of traumatic brain injury by studying genetic material in human cerebrospinal fluid. This will help clinicians and researchers ID markers of brain resilience after injury, and ultimately improve treatment for severe TBI.

Sleep is a critical behavioral state that fulfills essential needs for health, including clearing waste products (e.g., protein aggregates) from the brain. But sleep is not everlasting. As humans age, sleep quality strikingly deteriorates, and this decline is associated with dementias (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease).

With an aging population, neurodegenerative disorders contribute increasingly to our global health burden with no cure or effective treatments. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) are two neurodegenerative disorders that are distinct in clinical presentation (ALS impairs movement/breathing, whereas FTD impairs behavior/cognition).

There is one characteristic of all neurodegenerative diseases: the accumulation and aggregation of abnormal proteins in the patient’s brain. These aggregations are thought to induce neuronal cell death and brain degeneration.

With an aging population, neurodegenerative disorders contribute increasingly to our global health burden with no cure or effective treatments. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) are two neurodegenerative disorders that are distinct in clinical presentation (ALS impairs movement/breathing, whereas FTD impairs behavior/cognition).

The causes of neurodegenerative disorders like multiple sclerosis or Alzheimer’s disease are incompletely understood, hindering our ability to gain precise diagnoses and design effective therapeutics. Understanding how the circadian rhythms regulate myelin-forming precursors will impart unique insights into normal and aberrant myelination and will have a positive impact on developing therapeutic strategies to restructure myelin.

Using new animal models such as the African killifish, this team aims to develop approaches to predict individual brain aging trajectories early in life based on behaviors that can be modulated to promote healthy memory, executive function and processing speed as well as counter dementia.

This team will explore the idea that neurotoxic protein aggregates seen in neurodegenerative disorders act at the synaptic connections between cells, and that resilience against these disorders may come from natural synapse-supporting factors that could be transformed into new forms of therapy.

This team aims to better understand how Parkinson's disease attacks the brain's basic motor programs and to spawn novel therapies against the disease using gene-editing technology.

This team proposes the first comprehensive study of how mitochondrial DNA is related to cognitive function and susceptibility to dementia in a diverse population of over 11,000 adults. The outcomes of this study will provide insight into possible racial disparities in brain health.

This team plans to study whether changes in neurons in the midbrain that regulate sleep, wakefulness, and immunity could contribute to aging and neurodegeneration. If successful, this information could rescue deficits in sleep and restore a normal immune profile.

This team plans to map how age-related dysfunction of cellular waste disposal in lysosomes could lead to neurodegenerative diseases, potentially laying the foundation for a map of organelle function in the brain.

This team aims to define a network of genes that contribute to stress resistance in neurons and identify how it could be activated to enhance brain resilience and protect against neurodegenerative disease.

This team aims to discover whether the brain’s endocannabinoid system is dysregulated during aging, triggering inflammation via molecules called prostaglandins. If so, a drug that decouples these systems might restore a youthful brain state and rescue cognitive function.

This team will study the brains of individuals who lived past ninety with their cognitive function intact, using advanced tissue imaging and computer science to understand mechanisms of resilience that could slow neurodegeneration and preserve brain health.