Ching-Chieh Chou, PhD

My graduate training under the supervision of Drs. Wilfried Rossoll and Gary Bassell at Emory University provided a solid base from which to begin a career in the neuroscience of aging and neurodegenerative diseases. In the dissertation research, I identified the nuclear pore complex disassembly and neurotoxicity caused by pathological hallmark protein, TDP-43, as the common mechanism of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia. As a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Judith Frydman at Stanford University, I focused on lysosome biology in AD with limited knowledge of how lysosomes become defective and trigger protein aggregation and inflammation in the brain of Alzheimer's patients. This postdoctoral training is supported by an outstanding advisory team consisted of leading experts in their fields, including mentor Dr. Judith Frydman (proteostasis) and advisors Drs. Tony Wyss-Coray (AD, CRISPR), Marius Wernig (cell reprogramming), and Jeffery Kelly (drug discovery). This significant expansion of my technical and conceptual expertise in proteostasis, disease biology, cell reprogramming, genome editing and drug discovery technologies is one of the major goals under this award. I anticipate that this work will bridge a gap in the current knowledge of AD and provide deeper insights into aging pathways in human brain and points of biomarker discovery and therapeutic strategies for AD.