Professor, University of California - San Diego
McKnight Brain Research Foundation Innovator Awards in Cognitive Aging and Memory Loss - 2022
What inspired you to pursue aging research?
My early scientific endeavors were motivated by a fascination with episodic memory, a cognitive function that serves a critical role in constructing our personal identity by integrating our past with the present and anticipated future. Given the importance of memory to the human experience, my doctoral work on the brain bases of normal memory sparked a particular curiosity about conditions in which memory deteriorates, including both aging and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. Struck by the surprisingly elusive nature of the brain changes leading to these prevalent conditions, I’ve endeavored to develop a research program that aims to both disentangle the multifactorial pathways underlying cognitive decline and to identify biomarkers of early Alzheimer’s disease-related brain changes. The ultimate goal of my lab’s research is to optimize tools to detect the earliest predictors of cognitive decline and to guide strategies for successful brain aging.
In your view, what does AFAR mean to the field, and what does it mean, for you, to receive an AFAR grant now?
Funding from AFAR has been uniquely instrumental in guiding my research trajectory and supporting my career development as an independent investigator. As a postdoctoral fellow transitioning from cognitive neuroscience to the field of aging research, AFAR supported an exploratory project which provided preliminary findings that served as the foundation for an NIH-funded career develop award and in turn, for my current research program. Now, with a rapidly evolving lab, this award from AFAR and the McKnight foundation will provide the opportunity and essential resources to extend our prior work by leveraging recent methodological and theoretical advances to more deeply probe the mechanisms underlying brain ang cognitive aging.
What is exciting about your research’s potential impact?
One of the most promising aspects of my project is its potential to support a model of brain aging that unifies several established, yet still disconnected, risk factors and biological pathways. We know that cognitive decline with aging and dementia is very tightly linked to structural cellular changes such as loss of synapses, axons, and dendrites, and eventually cell death. It’s also well accepted that both genetics and modifiable health factors, notably inflammation and vascular dysfunction, are intimately tied to the brain abnormalities underlying cognitive decline. Although we’ve identified several key pieces to the puzzle, we have yet to assemble those pieces into a cohesive mechanistic model of brain aging. By taking a multimodal approach that integrates advanced brain imaging, biofluid, cognitive, and genetic measures, our research aims to place a critical piece of this puzzle, namely an explanation for how inflammation can injure the brain in synergy with vascular dysfunction. Ultimately, we hope our results will provide an actionable neurobiological framework that helps to explain the avenues leading to cognitive decline, while also guiding targeted therapeutic approaches to preserve cognitive health into later life.
How would you describe your research to a non-scientist?
Broadly, my research program aims to optimize trajectories of brain aging by clarifying the risk factors for, and pathways towards, cognitive decline. A complementary goal is to develop more sentitive markers of early brain changes that precipitate cognitive decline in order to identify individuals at greatest risk for dementia. To this end, my lab employs a multimodal approach, integrating cutting-edge brain imaging methods with behavioral testing, genetics, and fluid measures. By focusing our research on human participants without manifest cognitive impairment, we hope that our work will translate directly to clinical settings for early disease detection and therapeutic intervention.
