Congcong He, PhD

Dr. Congcong He is an assistant professor in the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology of Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. She obtained her undergraduate degree in biological sciences from Zhejiang University in China in 2004, and her PhD degree in cell biology from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) in 2009. She then received postdoctoral training focusing on protein degradation in mammalian physiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, before she established her own laboratory in 2013. Dr. He’s research interest is to understand how autophagy, a protein clearance pathway, regulates metabolism, neurodegeneration, and animal behavior using Alzheimer’s disease mouse models. Her team is in active collaboration with Dr. Robert Vassar’s lab at Northwestern University. Dr. He discovered several new mutations in autophagy genes that modulate the trafficking and metabolism of amyloids, and laid the foundation work on the role of autophagy in the regulation of memory and neuronal function in Alzheimer’s animals. The long-term goal of her laboratory is to fully understand the role and mechanism of the protein degradation pathways in neuronal regulation, and to demonstrate how to modulate autophagy to treat Alzheimer’s disease.