News
February 22, 2025
Postdoctoral fellows Thomas Morin and Hsiang-Yu Chen, along with graduate students Claire Ciampa and Rachel Marcus, attended the Dallas Aging and Cognition Conference this February. The lab showcased three posters:
- Tom presented "Dopaminergic contributions to functional network reconfiguration and reward memory in aging"
- Claire presented "Enhanced dopamine and relationships between hippocampal reactivation and episodic memory in aging"
- Rachel presented "Establishing the influence of memory-induced emotions on temporal memory structure in aging"
January 13, 2025
Fourth-year Neuroscience PhD student Tedy Markova recently returned form a six-month internship at Biogen. There, she worked with previously collected clinical trial data to examine how the pathological protein tau accumulated in the brain in individuals with Alzheimer's Disease. The goal is to use this information to create more nuanced methods to examine clinical trial results-allowing for a more rigourous assessment of drug efficacy and helping to design beneficial treatments for more patients!
December 2, 2024
Alex Adornato has re-joined our lab as a Program Manager. He will be working in the lab from December-May and serve as the primary point of contact for participants while Megan is on maternity leave. Alex is also currently pursuing his master's degree in project management from Boston University. He is excited to be back in the lab and help drive successful project execution.September 14, 2024
Come see us at the Waltham Farmers' Market! Saturdays from 9:30-2:00, June through October at 65 Lexington Street. We'll have a table a few times a season to meet our community members and invite everyone to join our research!
October 27, 2024
Neurochemistry and Cognition Lab Members joined the 2023 Greater Boston Walk to End Alzheimer's, which raised over $1.2 million to benefit the Alzheimer's Association. Thank you to everyone who supported our fundraiser and continues to support our research through participation!October 27, 2024
Members of the lab joined in the fun at the Western Greenway 5K on Sunday October 27th. A Brandeis Aging Brain Study participant graciously donated to the fundraiser in honor of our research, which allowed us to advertise our research at the event to expand our outreach to the Waltham community! We look forward to joining again next year.
September 11, 2024
The locus coeruleus (LC) produces catecholamines norepinephrine and dopamine. Our group has investigated the extent to which the PET tracer [18 F]Fluoro-m-tyrosine (FMT) can be used to assess the neurochemical health of the LC-catecholamine system. In her talk, Hsiang-Yu reviewed the research our group has done in cognitively unimpaired older adults, which demonstrates interactive effects between LC-catecholamine synthesis capacity and Alzheimer’s disease-related biomarkers on cognitive function. Specifically, we find that higher LC-catecholamine synthesis capacity is associated with lower temporal lobe tau cross-sectionally and longitudinally, and better-than-expected memory performance given one’s tau burden. Higher LC-catecholamine synthesis capacity is also associated with a reduced risk of dementia as indexed by lower trait neuroticism and fewer depressive symptoms. She also discussed our ongoing efforts to evaluate [ 18 F]FMT PET’s correspondence with LC MRI structural imaging measures and the limitations of the [18 F]FMT tracer. Despite limitations, our findings to date are promising and suggest that [ 18 F]FMT imaging of the LC can shed light on neurobiological mechanisms underlying individual differences in cognitive aging trajectories and vulnerability to Alzheimer’s disease.
August 26, 2024
Hanna Hu - Hanna is a local high school student interested in neuroscience. She assisted with data management and analysis, and supported PhD Student Daisy Kiyemba's project by transcribing participant audio that was recorded at MGH for the LC Study.
Victoria Curtis - Victoria is a student at Rochester Institute of Technology working on her B.S. in Psychology. Victoria assisted with data analysis for the Curiosity and Decision-Making study
August 3, 2024
More than 100 of our participants and their friends/family members joined us to celebrate 5 years of BABS! We all gathered on the Brandeis campus for food and drinks and great conversation. Dr. Berry gave a talk on cognition, memory, super-agers, current findings from our studies, and future research opportunities. We had an incredible amount of interest in our different active studies! Thank you to those who signed up for studies at the event! A video of Dr. Berry's talk is available - just click play on the picture!July 31, 2024
Teodora Markova's prested a poster on relationships between tau pathology and depressive symptoms across two independent datasets, with a particular focus on tau in the amygdala. Some evidence was identified for unique contributions of amygdala tau to depressive symptoms in a cognitively normal population, but stronger evidence for interactions between tau and the APOE E4 genotype on neuropsychiatric trajectories.
Dr Jennifer Crawford gave a presentation on the contribution of brain structure and tau pathology on memory ability and metamemory (i.e., how one thinks and feels about their memory). Among findings from this research was evidence that brain structure (i.e.,volume of the hippocampus) was related to memory ability, whereas tau pathology in the hippocampus was related to metamemory, suggesting that memory ability and metamemory are distinct processes supported by different neural mechanisms.
July 20, 2024
Jourdan Parent recently published a manuscript in Biological Psychology entitled "Pathological and neurochemical correlates of locus coeruleus functional network activity.” This paper reports evidence that increased signaling between brain regions that communicate with the locus coeruleus, a region vulnerable to early Alzheimer’s, are linked to a higher presence of Alzheimer’s disease-related pathologies. However, higher locus coeruleus neurotransmitter function may diminish these effects. Her findings support research focused on understanding how Alzheimer's-related tau pathology spreads throughout the brain.
July 3, 2024
Fourth year PhD Student Claire Ciampa was awarded an NIH NRSA F31 fellowship. The grant supports her research investigating dopaminergic mechanisms of reward memory in healthy aging. The project involves joint PET/fMRI scanning on and off the dopamine-enhancing drug methylphenidate. Current findings show that participants have better memory while on methylphenidate, and also have better memory if incentivized with a monetary reward. Future directions include testing whether dopamine function (measured using [11C]raclopride PET scans) supports memory performance, and analyzing whether fMRI pattern similarity measures are associated with dopamine and memory.June 10, 2024
The Brandeis Neuroscience PhD program awarded 4th year PhD student Claire Ciampa the Best First Talk award in Spring 2024 for her presentation on preliminary behavioral and neuroimaging results based on our Aging, Dopamine, and Decision Making (ADDM) study. Claire’s results demonstrated memory-enhancing effects of both a dopaminergic drug (methylphenidate) and monetary reward. She also found that hippocampal activation, which is measured with fMRI, supports better object-context associative memory, which is in line with previous work. This year, her talk will expand on these analyses by incorporating dopamine PET measures (using the PET tracer [11C]raclopride]) and fMRI pattern analyses to further investigate how an individual's dopamine function impacts reward memory and neural patterns of activity.
May 29, 2024
Jourdan Parent graduated with her PhD from the Psychology program after 5 years of working in the Neurochemistry & cognition Lab. She was extremely involved in the ADDM study, and has successfully authored and co-authored several papers on work in our lab, which can be found in our publications page. She is now a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital investigating network dynamics that underly cognitive symptoms of long-COVID and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome using multimodal neuroimaging. We celebrated her achievements with a cruise on the Boston Harbor. We'll miss you, Jourdan!April 29, 2024
This $450,000 grant will support research using behavioral, psychophysiological, neuroimaging, and naturalistic approaches to understand daily life activity and its connection to Alzheimer’s disease. Doing cognitively effortful activities has been associated with maintaining cognitive function and a decreased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease pathology. It is critical to understand the relationship between motivation to do these activities and changes to neuromodulatory systems. .
April 1, 2024
Lab members and staff attended the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference in April, 2024. Dr. Jourdan Parent, Dr. Hsiang-Yu Chen, and Dr. Jenny Crawford presented, along with PhD candidates Claire Ciampa and Tedy Markova. PhD candidates Rachel Marcus and Daisy Kiyemba attended as did research assistants Alex Adornato and Johanna Matulonis.
October 15, 2023
The 2023 Greater Boston Walk to End Alzheimer's raised over $1.2 million to benefit the Alzheimer's Association, and our lab members raised over $1600 in support of the cause. Thank you to everyone who supported our fundraiser and continues to support our research through participation!
September 27, 2023
Megan Applegate-Kenton, PhD joined the lab as the research program manager. She is the primary point of contact for study participants, manages the administrative aspects of the research, and is spearheading new initiatives for diverse community engagement. Megan studied psychology and exercise physiology, focusing on the physiological and psychological mechanisms of chronic pain. Following her studies, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Harvard University School of Engineering.
September 20, 2023
The National Institutes of Health awarded Dr. Berry $437,000 to study the "Dopaminergic mechanisms of resilience to Alzheimer's disease neuropathology."
Brain structure and function can be maintained despite the development of neuropathology. Certain neural mechanisms have been identified as potential targets for clinical intervention. Dopamine D2 receptor function has been linked to cortical thickness, executive function, and memory, and could act as a moderator of Alzheimer's Disease related tau and beta-amyloid pathology. This study will investigate the extent to which “optimal” D2 genotypes confer resilience to Alzheimer’s disease pathology.
January 13, 2023
Jennifer Crawford joined our lab as a postdoctoral fellow. She obtained her Ph.D. in psychological & brain sciences from Washington University.
November 12, 2022
Postdoctoral fellow Hsiang-Yu Chen presented her poster "Locus coeruleus structure and catecholamine synthesis capacity interact to predict cognitive function in aging".
Postdoctoral fellow Thomas Morin presented his poster "Hierarchical gradients in prefrontal cortex and hippocampus support context-dependent rule learning".
Graduate student Jourdan Parent presented her poster "Locus coeruleus catecholamine synthesis capacity moderates the effect of resting-state network coupling on attentional switching in aging".
Graduate student Claire Ciampa presented her poster "DAT1 and BDNF polymorphisms relate to beta-amyloid and tau pathology in cognitively normal older adults".
Graduate student Teodora Markova presented her poster "Sex differences in relationships between amygdala integrity, depressive symptoms, and serotonin synthesis capacity".
October 16, 2022
The Greater Boston Walk to End Alzheimer's raised over $960,000 to benefit the Alzheimer's Association, and our lab members raised over $2,600 in support of the cause. During the event, we had the pleasure of meeting and discussing our research goals with members of the community, then walked together with over 4,000 attendees in support of the Alzheimer's Association.
September 30, 2022
Graduate students Jourdan Parent and Claire Ciampa published their paper, "Locus coeruleus catecholamines link neuroticism and vulnerability to tau pathology in aging", in NeuroImage. Congratulations, Jourdan and Claire!
September 6, 2022
Alex Adornato joined our group as a research assistant who will be specializing in our neuroimaging studies.July 31, 2022
The article features our current projects and discusses the goals of our research. Read more about our research here.
July 12, 2022
Thomas Morin joined our lab as a postdoctoral fellow. He obtained his Ph.D. in neuroscience from Boston University.
May 26, 2022
Berry received a $6.2 million dollar grant from the National Institute on Aging to study the role of norepinephrine in the protection against Alzheimer's disease.
April 21, 2022
Graduate student Jourdan Parent presented her poster "Locus Coeruleus catecholamine synthesis capacity links susceptibility to depression with amygdala tau burden in aging" on April 25th.
Graduate student Claire Ciampa presented her poster "Associations between catecholamine synthesis, Alzheimer's pathology, cognition, and locus coeruleus functional connectivity" on April 24th.
Research assistant Jordyn Cowan presented her poster " The influence of dopamine synthesis capacity on reward-related learning and memory in aging" on April 24th.
Alumnus Jacqueline Epstein presented her poster "Interactions among dopamine, white matter integrity, and tau pathology in aging" on April 24th.
April 18, 2022
Katherine O'Malley has joined our group as Lead Project Administrator for the Brandeis Aging Brain Study.
January 18, 2022
Hsiang-Yu Chen joined our lab as our first postdoctoral fellow. She obtained her Ph.D. in psychology at Technische Universität Dresden.
January 15, 2022
Our paper "Associations Among Locus Coeruleus Catecholamines, Tau Pathology, and Memory in Aging" has been accepted for publication in Neuropsychopharmacology. Congratulations to graduate students Claire Ciampa and Jourdan Parent, and alumnus Rebekah Garrett.
September 21, 2021
Our first paper as a lab, "Elevated Dopamine Synthesis as a Mechanism of Cognitive Resilience in Aging", has been accepted for publication in Cerebral Cortex. Congratulations to graduate students Claire Ciampa, Jourdan Parent, and Morgan Taylor!
March 15, 2021
Graduate student Jourdan Parent presented her poster "Regional Homogeneity is Associated with Dopamine Synthesis Capacity and Maintenance Cognitive Stability in Older Adults".
Research assistant Claire Ciampa presented her poster "Longitudinal Decline in Cortical Thickness is Associated with Elevated Dopamine Synthesis Capacity in Aging".
April 1, 2021
Berry received the grant for her project "Locus Coeruleus Biomarker Development for Early Detection of Alzheimer's Disease in Humans".
January 17, 2019
Berry received the association's Rising Star Award, which honors psychological scientists in the earliest stages of their research careers.