Joseph
Herdy

Throughout Dr. Herdy’s scientific career, his focus has been on studying the consequences of genomic plasticity and how the genome isn’t a static, fixed structure but a dynamic living document that can change over time. During his Master’s at the University of Kentucky under Jeremiah Smith, he studied the curious genetic event of genome rearrangements in lamprey. This project left Dr. Herdy with an appreciation of the possibilities of genomic organization and an understanding that genomic instability can be programmed into cells instead of resulting from mutations. This led him to Rusty Gage’s lab during my PhD at UCSD, where Dr. Gage had identified a related process mediated by the mobile genetic element LINE-1 that changed the genomes of individual neurons in the human brain. Dr. Herdy’s research as a graduate student provided him with a solid foundation in neurodegeneration, stem cell biology, and reprogramming techniques that I could use to identify genetic features in age-equivalent human neurons in vitro. A major finding was that Alzheimer’s disease neurons activated senescence and ultimately inflammatory pathways. Now, as a postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Herdy is continuing to understand how genomic plasticity influences this pathological event in Alzheimer’s. Together with Brightfocus Foundation, his work aims to understand how LINE-1 activation is misinterpreted by the host as a viral infection and causes inflammatory pathology, paving the way for targeting this process to prevent age-associated disease.