Faculty

Stella Alimperti: Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine: maintenance, loss of function, and repair of tissues (such as bone) through tissue engineering.

Tina Brelidze: Ion channel regulation: ion channel function changes with aging, defined by a combination of electrophysiology, molecular dynamics simulations, and animal models.

Casey Brown: Emotional and Social Aspects of Aging and Neurodegenerative Disorders: social and emotional impairments and their interpersonal effects on caregivers’ mental and physical health.

Mark Burns: Traumatic brain injury (TBI): mechanisms of neurodegeneration from repetitive mild TBI, including factors such as aging, APOE status, and sleep.

Isaac Cervantes-Sandoval: Learning, memory and forgetting: the cellular and molecular mechanisms of active forgetting and how they are affected by aging. 

Amrita K Cheema: Cancer and aging: the role of extracellular vesicles in mediating the etiology and onset of pancreatic cancer and investigating how aging exacerbates tumorigenesis.

Hong-Yuan Chu: Circuitry dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease. identifying cellular and synaptic targets of neural circuit dysfunction associated with motor and nonmotor symptoms.

Kathy Conant: Brain debris clearance and neuronal remodeling: role of extracellular matrix regulation in effects of depression therapies and aging on cognitive reserve in animal models.

Rebekah Evans: Degeneration in Parkinson’s disease: slice electrophysiology and two-photon calcium imaging with optogenetics in mice to identify circuits affected by neurodegeneration and aging.

Patrick Forcelli: Neural circuitry underlying seizure: treatments of seizures in perinatal and adult animal models using pharmacological, electrical, and pharmacogenetic and optogenetic methods. 

Nady Golestaneh: Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD): defining the underlying mechanism of AMD using adult stem cells, new animal models, and drug development.

Brent Harris: Pathological characteristics of neurodegenerative disease: glia in the pathophysiology of neurodegeneration, including cell culture, mouse models, and human tissues (in particular, ALS).

Haiyan He: Plasticity and proteostasis: cellular and molecular mechanisms in experience-dependent plasticity and circuit homeostasis, including degradation of activity-induced nascent proteins.

Jeff Huang: Glia-neuron interactions in myelination: mechanisms of oligodendrocyte regulation and myelin regeneration in neuroinflammation associated with neurodegeneration and aging.

Xiong Jiang: Functional brain imaging as biomarkers: advanced MRI techniques to detect and quantify neural injury at early stages of neurodegeneration in AD and HIV infection.

Priyanka Joshi: Protein folding and misfolding: metabolite-protein interactions in cellular and mouse models using structural proteomics and computational and biophysical methods

Moshe Levi: Molecular processes of liver and renal disease: nuclear receptor FXR, G protein-coupled receptors, and mitochondrial sirtuins in kidney disease in diet-induced obesity, diabetes, and aging.  

Kathy Maguire-Zeiss: Glial activation in neurodegeneration: molecular mechanisms of immune responses in brain disorders that are typified by protein misfolding and inflammation.

Jeanne Mandelblatt: Cancer screening and survivorship: longitudinal cohort and population-based studies into cognitive disruption in cancer and cancer treatments.

Italo Mocchetti: Cross-talk of HIV and AD neuropathogenesis: commonalities between HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders, aging, and neurodegeneration in the loss of synapses, focusing on neurotrophins.

Charlie Moussa: Clinical therapeutics to promote autophagy in proteinopathies: potential therapeutic drugs for neurodegenerative diseases in pre-clinical models and current clinical trials.

Alexey Ostroumov: Synaptic and neural circuit disruption: combining electrophysiology and pharmacology with rodent behavior and molecular and optogenetic tools.

Dan Pak: Dendritic spine plasticity: normal physiological roles of AD-related genes (APP and tau) related to synaptic function and plasticity. 

Bill Rebeck: APOE and Alzheimer’s disease: effects of APOE genotype in mouse models of cognitive impairment with AD, cancer chemotherapy and normal aging.

Jana Reifegerste: Language across the lifespan: human language and memory changes across the adult lifespan in both healthy aging and neurodegeneration. 

Kathryn Sandberg: Sex Differences in health, aging and disease: pathological consequences of blood pressure dysregulation in hypertension, renal disease, anorexia nervosa, aging and cognitive impairment.

Peter Turkeltaub: Stroke in language and cognition: changes in the brain organization for language and other cognitive faculties in aging-related disorders, with identification of mechanisms to enhance recovery. 

Scott Turner: Biomarkers and clinical trials in AD and HIV-related dementias: development and validation of novel biomarkers for AD, clinical trials of AD drugs, and interactions of geriatric HIV with AD.

Michael Ullman: Language and memory: human declarative/procedural model of language and other cognitive abilities in the aging brain.

TingTing Wang: Homeostatic plasticity: pathways in drosophila and mouse models that underlie the homeostatic control of the nervous system.