Masato Maesako, PhD

Dr. Maesako is a post-doctoral research fellow in the lab of Dr. Oksana Berezovska at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). During his graduate school career at Kyoto University/Japan, Dr. Maesako worked with Prof. Ayae Kinoshita, investigating the effect of environmental factors that include diet and exercise on the pathological and behavioral progression of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) using mouse models. His work resulted in a series of publications that support the beneficial roles of exercise in AD, and one of his first author papers was selected as The Journal of Biological Chemistry Paper of the Year 2012. During his post-doc training at Dr. Berezovska lab at MGH (2014-present), Dr. Maesako has mainly focused on the presenilin (PS)/γ-secretase biology. PS/γ-secretase is involved in many essential biological events and also plays a significant role in the broad range of diseases that are related to brain, skin, immune system, etc. Dr. Maesako has been awarded several Foundation awards and fellowships, and has been working hard for the proposed research by developing and optimizing several novel Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET)-based imaging assays to address unsolved questions in AD.