Non-invasive neurostimulation is a potential therapeutic approach to Alzheimer’s disease, with the potential to rescue memory impairment in humans. In June 2023, I became a research scientist at the Atlanta VA Medical Center, where I was awarded a Career Development Award (CDA2) for 5 years of protected research. As a research scientist, I investigate how non-invasive audio-visual neurostimulation at specific frequencies (aka flicker) alters neuropathology, such as microglia's engulfment of amyloid plaques and microglia morphology, in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease. Because half a million United States Veterans have Alzheimer's disease, and that number is expected to grow, this research has the potential to identify a noninvasive treatment for Alzheimer's disease neuropathology.
In 2019 I joined Dr. Annabelle Singer's lab as a postdoctoral fellow in the department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Singer has established and continues to develop a new therapeutic approach to Alzheimer’s disease, novel forms of non-invasive neurostimulation, and new ways to manipulate the brain’s immune system. This research was recently published in Science Advances in 2023.
As a graduate research fellow in the lab of Dr. Gregory Berns at Emory University, I examined the neural mechanisms underlying perception in pet dogs through noninvasive, unrestrained, unsedated functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI).
As a graduate research fellow in the lab of Dr. Mark Galizio and Dr. Kate Bruce at University of North Carolina Wilmington, I examined behavioral models of concept formation in rodents using odor stimuli as well as behavioral and memory deficits following administration of drugs of abuse.
Some questions should not be asked. However, someone always does.
‘How does it work?’ said Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully, the Master of Unseen University.
This was the kind of question that Ponder Stibbons hated almost as much as ‘How much will it cost?’
They were two of the hardest questions a researcher ever had to face.
- Sir Terry Pratchett - The Science of Discworld