Thursday
September 17, 3:00pm
HSC 4E20
Colloquium announcement



Margaret Fahnestock PhD 

Professor
Department of Psychiatry & Behavioural Neurosciences
McMaster University 
 
"Neurotrophins and the mechanism of neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease."
Dear MiNDS students & faculty,

I am pleased to invite you to attend the MiNDS Colloquium TODAY Thursday September 17th at 3:00 in HSC 4E20. Bring your coffee cup for coffee and cookies before the talk at 2:45.
As a special treat, Dr. Fahnestock's talk will be preceded by two MiNDS student talks. Shawna Thompson, a PhD candidate in Dr. Jane Foster's lab will give a talk titled "Peripheral Immune Influence on the CNS" the second student talk will be by Anthony Nazarov, a PhD candidate in Dr. Margaret McKinnon's lab, titled "Social Cognition in PTSD".

Dr. Margaret Fahnestock is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences. Dr. Fahnestock completed her BSc in Biology at Stanford and her PhD at University of California, Berkeley. She has a long track record of academic leadership including serving as President of the Southern Ontario Neuroscience Association three times, session chair at the Society for Neuroscience meeting, and serving on grant review committees for the Medical Research Council of Canada, CIHR, Alzheimer Society of Canada, and the NIH (National Institute of Aging, USA). Margaret was also one of the founders of the MiNDS Neuroscience Graduate Program here at McMaster and its first Associate Director.

Dr. Fahnestock is internationally recognized for her work on neurotrophic factors. Her specific area of expertise is the regulation and biosynthesis of neurotrophin expression in human brain and the role of neurotrophins in neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy and autism. She has published over 100 scholarly manuscripts and book chapters, including five that have been chosen as "Papers of the Week" by Alzheimer Research Forum. Dr. Fahnestock is well known for pioneering the quantification of scarce mRNAs in human post-mortem brain tissue and for sparking interest in the role of proneurotrophins in CNS. Margaret's laboratory uses molecular techniques to study proteins essential for nervous system development, plasticity and function.

In her talk today Dr. Fahnestock will discuss how the neurotrophins nerve growth factor (NGF) and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) are critical molecules for neuronal survival and function. Brain neurotrophin levels correlate with cognitive status. NGF and BDNF are dysregulated in Alzheimer's disease, in age-related cognitive impairment and in a variety of other neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders exhibiting cognitive deficits. BDNF is downregulated in the Alzheimer's disease brain by soluble, aggregated amyloid-beta, acting via a pathway involving soluble, aggregated tau, the transcription factor cAMP response element binding protein, and BDNF transcript IV. NGF, present in the brain as proNGF, is not transcriptionally regulated but rather accumulates in the Alzheimer's disease brain, likely as a function of disrupted axonal transport.  The potential for diagnostic and therapeutic use of neurotrophins in neurodegenerative disease will be discussed.
 
 
We look forward to seeing you at the talk today.
 
Regards
 
Sandra
 
---
on behalf of... 
Kathryn M Murphy PhD
Professor and Director MiNDS Graduate Program
Dept of Psychology Neuroscience & Behaviour
McMaster University
1280 Main St W 
Hamilton ON L8S 4K1