What inspired you to pursue aging research?
I have always been interested in understanding how memory works, but really only began to consider how memory fails when I was a postdoc. Figuring out how the brain changes across the lifespan is the ultimate challenge. The unique thing about aging is that it’s something everyone will experience – at least everyone lucky enough to live a long life. Without intact cognition, that long life isn’t a gift, however. If my research can help improve memory and cognition in old age, even a little, this work could have an enormous impact, including within my own small circle of loved ones. That’s really what inspires me to do this work – it is helping to solve a big and very important problem.
In your view, what does AFAR mean to the field, and what does it mean, for you, to receive an AFAR grant now?
AFAR is the leader in advancing research across the different domains of aging and I am incredibly grateful to the support and encouragement I have gotten from this organization. AFAR was one of the first organizations to support my independent research on aging, with the AFAR/GFMR Grant for Junior Faculty, something that kept me in the aging field. AFAR’s annual grantee conference is also a wonderful networking event that has connected me with leading aging researchers across the country. This AFAR/McKnight Brain Research Foundation Innovator Award will allow me to expand my work in an exciting new direction and give me the support to take a riskier approach to understanding age-related cognitive decline. This question has been simmering in my mind for a while and I am so excited to now have the resources to figure out how aging affects transcription in these memory-storing cells. These grants from AFAR allow me the intellectual freedom to answer these exciting questions about memory and aging.
What is exciting about your research’s potential impact?
Age-related memory decline will impact nearly everyone who lives into old age, yet we know very little about why memory is impaired and even less about how to treat cognitive decline. My work focuses on an understudied aspect of memory that is especially vulnerable to aging: memory updating. Understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms that support this process will advance our understanding of age-related cognitive decline and hopefully provide new avenues for treatments that can prevent or improve memory in old age.
How would you describe your research to a non-scientist?
Most human memories are updates, changes to things we have already learned. In the lab, we usually study brand new memory formation, so we understand very little about how this updating process works. Although there is evidence that aging individuals across species have difficulty updating memories, we know very little about the mechanisms that underlie this decline. My lab has developed a memory updating task to address this specific question and we think that old animals fail to properly reactivate and modify the right brain cells when a memory update occurs. We also think that blocking an important enzyme that usually limits memory, will be able to correct these changes and restore normal memory updating in the old brain. We hope that identifying these mechanisms will identify avenues to improve memory updating and cognition in old age.
