2News & Events

A new $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health is enabling Vanderbilt University chemist Renã A.S. Robinson to expand her research on racial disparities in Alzheimer’s and other diseases. Robinson, an associate professor of chemistry and Dorothy J. Wingfield Phillips Chancellor Faculty Fellow, is the co-principal investigator on the R01 grant, which is designed to develop and test recruiting materials aimed at encouraging older African Americans to participate in Alzheimer’s research.

Vanderbilt Memory and Alzheimer's Center is one of four newly-minted exploratory Alzheimer's Disease Research Centers (ADRC) funded by an NIA P20 grant. The P20 grant awards are designed to allow programs to build capacity as they work towards becoming a full P30-funded ADRC. Vanderbilt Memory and Alzheimer's Center fills an important service gap in the southeastern U.S. and makes key research contributions to the ADRC network.

The 2019-2020 fiscal year was productive for the Vanderbilt Memory and Alzheimer's Center. View our 2020 Impact Report here to learn about important scientific findings and programmatic achievements from this year.

Dr. Tim Hohman recently presented findings from a genome-wide association study (GWAS) that confirmed a link between resilience to Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology and ATP8B1, a gene also involved with bile processing in the liver. Dr. Hohman's approach harmonized data from four different study cohorts, giving his team an exceptionally large sample size (5,108) to work with.