The National Institute of Health (NIH) has awarded a 2.25 million dollar grant to University of Wyoming associate professor, Dr. Yun Li, to advance her Alzheimer’s disease research.
The RF1 grant will provide funding for the first three years of planned research that Dr. Li and her team are conducting. This research is focused on prefrontal neural activity that is linked to Alzheimer’s Disease.
“The NIH made an announcement in November of 2021 to the whole scientific community,” said Dr. Li. “When we saw this call, we were super excited. This was our chance to get some more support. So, we applied in February of this year.”
The application that Dr. Li and her colleagues submitted included a 12-page proposal that was comprised of their hypothesis, preliminary data, and their budget plan. Dr. Li has collaborators on this study, from Johns Hopkins university, and they are working as a team.
“The money we received, half of it will be sent to our collaborators at Johns Hopkins,” said Dr. Li, “We focus on mouse models, and they focus on human models and human stem cells.”
Dr. Li is currently working on this collaborative project with Dr. Rongsong Liu, an associate professor of Mathematics at UW, alongside Dr. Philip Wong and Dr. Gabsang Lee, both professors at Johns Hopkins University. They collaborated, in part, due to their common interests in studying the mechanisms of neural activities in early Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD).
“Using a very small microscope, or miniscope, we are studying mouse models, which can mimic human pathology, to study neuroactivity from a live brain” said Dr. Li. “My interest is in the prefrontal cortex of the mouse brain.”
There is currently no effective treatment or prevention for ADRD, which are debilitating conditions that impair memory, thought processes, and functioning that occur primarily in older adults. Dr. Li and her colleagues are conducting this research in hopes of finding a way to reverse the devastating effects of ADRD.
“There is no way to detect these diseases right now until patients are symptomatic, and usually by the time we do identify patients, it is too late” said Dr. Li. “The key word here is early. We are really digging into it.”
Dr. Li graduated with a Master’s in Biology from the University of Science and Technology of China, before progressing to getting a Phd in Physiology from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. She has worked in research at various universities and laboratories ever since.
“My interest in this field started in 2007 when I was working with a neuroscientist studying neurodegenerative disorders at the Johns Hopkins University of Medicine.” Said Dr. Li.
Dr. Li came to the University of Wyoming in 2018, doing research in the Department of Zoology and Physiology, while working as an associate professor.
“I am really grateful that they allowed me to lead this project,” said Dr. Li. “We are all very complementary to one another.”
