Mark Ebbert, PhD

Dr. Mark T. W. Ebbert, coming from the Mayo Clinic, recently accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky's Sanders-Brown Center on Aging to continue his research in complex neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Ebbert's background is in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Genomics, making it possible for him to approach Alzheimer's disease in ways that are both distinct and important. The human genome and all downstream processes are complex, requiring sophisticated approaches to understand, and to understand what gives rise to terrible diseases like Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Ebbert is employing cutting-edge long-range and long-read sequencing approaches, along with corresponding computational approaches, to interrogate top Alzheimer's disease genes to identify specific molecular mechanisms driving disease, because, to date, we still lack specific mechanisms for most genes implicated in disease. He hopes to utilize these discoveries to help develop a meaningful therapeutic and a pre-symptomatic disease diagnostic, making it possible to slow or stop development of this terrible disease before symptoms ever onset.