KAC Elliot Lecture: Metabolic Vulnerabilities and Opportunities

Metabolic Vulnerabilities and Opportunities in Brain Function

Abstract: Our brains are metabolically vulnerable, as even brief interruptions in proper fueling lead to rapid degradation in cognitive performance. My lab identified presynaptic function as one of the likely loci of this vulnerability and has leveraged the sensitivity of synaptic vesicle recycling to metabolic compromise to dissect the molecular underpinnings of how local ATP production is balanced during electrical activity in axons. Our work has helped identify critical control points that in turn appear central to neurodegenerative diseases and offer new therapeutic approaches to neurodegeneration.

Bio: Timothy Ryan, PhD is a Rockefeller/Sloan-Kettering/Cornell Tri-Institutional Professor in the department of Biochemistry & Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine. He earned is BSc and MSc in Physics at McGill University and his PhD in Physics at Cornell University. Following postdoctoral work in the department of Molecular & Cellular Physiology at Stanford he joined the faculty at Weill Cornell Medicine in 1997. He was an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, a two-time recipient of the McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award and a recipient of the NINDS Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award. In 2017 he became a senior fellow (now termed Scholar) at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia research campus. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

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