David Braun pursued his doctoral research in the laboratory of Douglas Feinstein, PhD, which specialized in the role of the noradrenergic system in the context of various central nervous system disorders. My work there focused on Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and how noradrenaline from the Locus coeruleus system can act to modulate neuroinflammatory processes that are critical in AD pathophysiology and important in both cognitive and behavioral symptoms of dementia.

David writes on his T32 experience:

The T32 provided me with critical early support in development of technical skills across a number of different research projects. This training included techniques such as mouse breeding and colony maintenance, stereotaxic surgeries, behavioral screening, cell culture, immunohistochemistry, PCR, and western blot, which are vital to a translational research career in the AD field. The research begun under the T32alsoearnedmeseveral awards including a 2014 Provost-Deiss Award for Graduate Research, enabling me to travel to Stanford to learn the CLARITY technique for whole-brain clearing and imaging. I received two travel awards to attend the American Society for Neurochemistry and International Society for Neurochemistry conferences in 2015, as well as the Paul. D. Doolen Graduate Scholarship for the Study of Aging. Crucially, I was able to build the foundation to become a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Kentucky Alzheimer’s Disease Center (UK-ADC), one of the original and longest running of the NIA-funded Alzheimer’s Disease Centers. I am working in the laboratory of the Center’s director, Dr. Linda Van Eldik, where I’ve received funding support from the Weston Brain Institute and the National Institute on Aging (F32). My current project is focused on preclinical drug development in rodent models of AD with comorbid vascular pathology, a situation that is common in people with dementia. I am learning non-invasive neuroimaging techniques to expand my technical repertoire as a translational researcher, and in addition, I now have the resources to verify novel findings from my mouse models in human samples available through the UK-ADC. Without the early support of the T32 and the overall exposure to neuroscience that it offered, it is difficult to
imagine that I would have been able to progress to this point as an early-career researcher in the AD field.