Chen, Jeannie
Professor of Physiology and Neuroscience
The major focus of my laboratory is to study sensory neuron signaling and mechanisms of retinal degeneration and neurodegeneration using cell culture and rodent models. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, we deciphered basic mechanisms of sensory neuron signal transduction and disease pathogenesis in retinal degeneration and neurodegeneration where protein mis-folding and aggregation is an underlying cause of disease.
Ching, Christopher
Assistant Professor of Research Neurology
Dr. Ching’s research focuses on neuroimaging and genomic markers of psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. As a core organizing member of the Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) Consortium, he designs and implements standardized processing and analysis techniques for large-scale neuroimaging studies. He leads the ENIGMA Bipolar Disorder Working Group, an effort pooling data and resources from around the world to improve our understanding of the biological processes driving bipolar disorder, and studies rare copy number variants like 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome to understand how genetic mutations can lead to increased risk for developing psychiatric illness. He leads several large-scale transdiagnostic neuroimaging and genomic initiatives using machine learning to map common and distinct brain and clinical factors across mental illnesses.
Choupan, Jeiran
Assistant Professor of Research Neurology
I have been working in the field of neuroimage processing and computational neuroscience since 2009. My focus is on employing advanced neuroimaging and machine learning techniques to improve structural and functional mapping of the brain to study neurodegenerative disorders. In particular, my main research focus is on mapping vascular and perivascular features of the brain across lifespan in health and in the presence of cognitive decline and dementia. Perivascular space is a major component of the brain clearance system and plays an important role in maintaining a healthy functioning brain, particularly in elderly and individuals at risk of neurodegenerative disease.
Coba, Marcelo
Neurodevelopmental neurodegenerative and psychiatric disease are complex brain disorders, and a multitude of genes have been described to contribute to their pathology with different penetrance. Human genetic studies have discovered many genes associated with disease susceptibility that are usually described as risk factors. For each of these disorders, synaptic proteins have been implicated, in particular those involved in synaptic plasticity and protein complexes associated to the post-synaptic density (PSD). Despite these discoveries, there has been a gap in understanding the underlying mechanisms that contribute to cellular dysfunction in these disorders. Our long-term goal is to determine how candidate risk factors are functionally integrated and how mutations affect their function, not individually, but in developmental signaling networks.
Cohen, Pinchas
Distinguished Professor of Gerontology, Medicine and Biological Sciences
The Cohen lab studies mitochondrial microproteins. We take a systems biology approach to mitochondria, looking at mitochondrial ORFomics, mito-genomics, mitochondrial-epigenetics, mito-transcriptomics and mitochondrial-proteomics. Our discovery pipeline involves novel bioinformatic approaches to clone and advance disease-relevant mitochondrial-derived peptides. We utilize MiWAS (mitochondrial GWAS), MDPseq (mitochondrial RNAseq) and related tools, to identify new microproteins involved in diseases of aging. Over the last two decades we described multiple novel genes including humanin and its cytoprotective and neuroprotective roles; MOTS-c, which is an exercise-mimetic peptide in which a loss-of-function mutation predisposes to diabetes, that has been advanced to clinical trials in humans; SHLP2, which is involved in neurodegenerative diseases; SHMOOSE, a neuroprotective microprotein that harbors a mutation that predisposes to Alzheimer’s disease, and multiple other previously unrecognized microproteins. Our goal is to continue to develop diagnostic tools and therapeutic targets for health aging
Cortes, Constanza
Assistant Professor of Gerontology
We investigate the mechanisms of exercise-associated neuroprotection in the context of aging and Alzheimer's disease. We utilize transgenic exercice-mimetic transgenic mice in combination with running interventions to isolate and prioritize novel 'exerkines' to move into pre-clinical trials. We are also building an 'exercise atlas' of the brain across the lifespan, with the ultimate goal of developing exercise in a pill as a novel intervention for Alzheimer's disease
