Sarah
Heuer

Sarah Heuer is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Young-Pearse lab in the Department of Neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She received her Bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia in 2015, and soon after worked as an Investigative Analyst at AMPEL BioSolutions to develop bioinformatics pipelines to improve Lupus patient therapeutics. In 2017, she entered the Mammalian Genetics program at Tufts University and The Jackson Laboratory, where she earned her PhD in Genetics under the supervision of Drs. Gareth Howell and Erik Bloss. Sarah began her postdoc in the Fall of 2023 and is spearheading several projects investigating aspects of polygenic and monogenic AD risk using a diverse array of human induced pluripotent stem cell models. Sarah is specifically interested in the ABCA7 protein and understanding how AD risk variants in this gene cause intrinsic glial cell dysfunction and non-autonomous disruption of the surrounding cells of the brain parenchyma. Sarah was awarded a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the BrightFocus Foundation in the Spring of 2024, which will support her work on elucidating ABCA7 genetic risk and cellular functional consequences in AD using stem cell models. Sarah aspires to become an independent investigator, where she will leverage expertise in mouse and human preclinical AD models to elucidate how genetic risk contributes to AD molecular subtypes, and how this information can be harnessed to improve treatments.