Tami Stevenson

Research Fellow

tamaraks@umich.edu

Despite obvious pathological protein aggregation in Alzheimer’s disease (i.e., amyloid-β plaques and tau tangles), little is known about mislocalization of other proteins in AD pathology and how that mislocalization may be affecting neuronal function; protein mislocalization in normal aging brains has yet to be characterized. Using resilient gene candidates identified from transcriptomic studies of cognitively resilient and susceptible AD-BXD mice (polygenic mouse model of human AD), my postdoctoral research is focused on using high-resolution confocal microscopy to investigate the subcellular localization pattern of resilience-related protein targets in hippocampal and frontal cortical neural circuits of AD-BXD mice and human tissue. These data will be critical for fully elucidating cellular mechanisms of cognitive resilience and susceptibility in normal aging and Alzheimer’s disease.