News of 2023
- January 2023: Happy New Year! We had a great start at the Human Amyloid Imaging Conference where Elouise presented her work on FDG-locus coeruleus signal in Alzheimer's disease, Nina presented her work on predicting entorhinal tau and disease progression using the locus coeruleus. Lindsay presented on the relationship between locus coeruleus structure and practice effects, while Heidi presented on the locus coeruleus as neural substrate of resilience. Finally, Elisenda presented on temporal ordering of locus coeruleus changes and tau accumulation!
- February 2023: Welcome to two new blue spotters in the team!! Roshni Singh has started her coop position (Northeastern University) in our group and in Maastricht Yuliya Patsyuk started a PhD-position on in vivo and ex vivo imaging of the brainstem. Welcome!!
- April 2023: Maxime van Egroo published his work on 7T Locus coeruleus imaging and novel plasma markers of Alzheimer's disease in Molecular Psychiatry. Whitney Freeze published her work on locus coeruleus pathology and cerebral microangiopathy in Alzheimer's & Dementia! Congratulations!!!
- April - May 2023: Exciting news!! Elouise Koops received an Alzheimer's Assocaition Research Fellowship to continue her work on locus coeruleus metabolism. Joost Riphagen received a BrightFocus Postdoctoral fellowship to work on the basal forebrain and tau spreading. Maxime van Egroo received the Marie Curie Sklodowska Global Fellowship to continue his work on the neuromodulatory subcortical systems and sleep in Alzheimer's disease in Boston.. CONGRATULATIONS to all!!!
- May 2023: Prokopis Prokopiou was promoted to instructor and received the prestigious Trailblazer R21 award from the NIA, allowing him to further develop neuroimaging-based methods to measure tonic versus phasic locus coeruleus activity! Congratulations Prokopis !
- July 2023: More exciting news!! Marion Baillet received an Alzheimer's Association Research Fellowship to work on the role of the hypothalamic nuclei in the pathophysiology of Alzheimer's disease. CONGRATULATIONSl!!!
- July 2023: The Blue Spot lab attended the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Amsterdam with poster presentations by Prokopis, Elouise, Chris, Eli, Nina, Elise, Yuliya, Maxime and Heidi. On Saturday, Elouise presented her locus coeruleus FDG-work during the Neurmodulatory Subcortical Systems PIA meeting and Heidi discussed her locus coeruleus work on Wednesday during a featured research session (chaired by Lea Grinberg and Heidi).
- July 2023: Our latest work, spearheaded by Prokopis, on the association between novelty-related locus coeruleus activity and accumulation of entorhinal tau deposition in preclinical Alzheimer's disease was published in Neurology!! Congrats Prokopis and team!!
- July 2023: Lindsay Smegal has started graduate school at Georgia State University and Roshni Singh has continued her program at Northeastern University! We wish them good luck and will miss them dearly.
We welcome our new lab members: Jill Grube and Mia Antunovic have just started their coop training in our lab. Welcome, we are excited to have you in our team! - July 2023: We are seeking to hire a postdoctoral fellow on locus coeruleus connectomics of resilience in Alzheimer's disease. This is a collaboration with the Jorge Sepulcre Lab at MGH. Preferred start date is fall/winter 2023, but is negotiable. See our announcement for more information.
- August 2023: Our lab is seeking to hire a Neuroimaging data analyst! Do you love working with 3T MRI, 7T MRI and PET imaging, do you enjoy the challenge of integrating the acquisition and analyses of imaging data with other modalities (physiology, eye-tracking, neurostimulation,...), do you like to build new methods, imaging pipelines and integrate them with existing ones, and finally: do you have interest in the brainstem and Alzheimer' s disease? Then apply!!! This is a lab-wide position, working in all aspects of acquiring, analyzing data from various projects, including interventions, observational studies and helping collaborators.
- September 2023: CONGRATULATIONS to Joost for receiving the R21 award from the NIH-NIA funding his proposed project on task-dependent pupil responses as an early detection method for Alzheimer's disease!
- November 2023: We welcome Nina Fultz to our lab as PhD-student. Nina will be tackling the raphe nucleus system in aging and Alzheimer's disease! We had our annual lab activity at the Bowling venue in Charlestown!