Merina Varghese

Pathological changes in the brain occurring in neurological and psychiatric diseases drive my research interest. I am currently investigating cellular pathology in postmortem brains from subjects with Alzheimer's disease and in surgically resected tissue from subjects with epilepsy, to identify markers of disease compared to neurologically healthy controls. Separately, I am comparing dendritic and synaptic morphology in the prefrontal cortex of Shank3-deficient rats to the wild-type using confocal and electron microscopic imaging. My goal is to contribute to understanding how deletions of the Shank3 protein affect synaptic structure and function in autism spectrum disorders. I am also undertaking a stereological quantification of neurons in the brain in Prader-Willi syndrome. My previous research has uncovered biochemical changes, specifically mitochondrial dysfunction and protein aggregation, occurring in animal and cellular models of various neurodegenerative disorders, as well as changes in neuron morphology and blood vessel pathology in the brain of a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease, expressing only soluble amyloid-beta.