Macauley Lab

ABOUT

As part of the Sticht Center for Healthy Aging and Alzheimer's Disease Prevention at Wake Forest School of Medicine, the Macauley Lab focuses on the role of metabolic dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, 1 in 8 Americans over the age of 65 has Alzheimer’s disease, nearly 1 in 2 has AD by the age of 85, and AD accounted for an estimated $183 billion in health care costs to Americans in 2011. Similarly, type-2-diabetes is metabolic disorder that affects approximately 346 million people worldwide, with an estimated 3.4 million dying from diabetes in 2004 alone. Since recent studies demonstrate that patients with type-2-diabetes have an increased risk for developing AD, the goal of our research is to understand how metabolic disruption affects Alzheimer's disease and whether shared mechanisms between type-2-diabetes and Alzheimer's disease can be targeted therapeutically.

LAB MEMBERS

Shannon L. Macauley, PhD

Principal Investigator

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Dr. Macauley's CV        

Assistant Professor, Gerontology & Geriatrics, Wake Forest School of Medicine

Education/Training: BA, Middlebury College; PhD, Washington University School of Medicine; Postdoctoral Fellowship, Washington University School of Medicine
 

Shannon L. Macauley earned her BA in Biology and Psychology from Middlebury College (Middlebury, VT) and worked in translational neuroscience at Genzyme Corporation (Boston, MA) prior to graduate school.  Dr. Macauley completed her Ph.D. in Neuroscience at Washington University (St. Louis, MO) with Dr. Mark Sands and her postdoctoral training in Alzheimer’s disease in the laboratory of Dr. David Holtzman at Washington University (St. Louis, MO).  Dr. Macauley joined the Sticht Center for Healthy Aging and Alzheimer’s Prevention at Wake Forest Baptist Health as an Assistant Professor in August 2017.  The goal of Dr. Macauley’s research is to understand central nervous system (CNS) disease and how mechanistic drivers of neuronal dysfunction, such as metabolic dysfunction, sleep impairment, vascular damage, and neuroinflammation, can be targeted therapeutically,  To date, her work has focused on two main areas: first, the study of mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative disease and the development of CNS therapeutics as it relates to lysosomal storage diseases.  Second, the exploration of the link between type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease, how metabolic challenges affect normal brain function in health and disease, and how metabolic dysfunction can be targeted as a therapeutic approach for treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes.

Current Members  

John

Grizzanti, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow

T32 fellow

Andy

Snipes

Research Assistant

&

Lab Manager Extraordinaire

Sarah

Kaye

3rd year PhD student

Neuroscience

Past Members