Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a leading cause of disability in children and adults. TBI affects 69 million people worldwide yearly and can lead to cognitive dysfunction, difficulty with sensory processing, sleep disruption, and epilepsy. Most of these adverse outcomes manifest months or years after TBI and are caused by indirect secondary injuries that develop as consequences of the initial impact. Because the primary injury is essentially irreversible, understanding where, when, and how secondary injuries develop is crucial for preventing or treating disability after TBI.
Our research program aims to address these gaps. The talk will focus on our ongoing work that suggests that after an injury to the cerebral cortex, a wave of inflammation slowly travels to a deep brain region called the thalamus, where it causes secondary damage to a subset of vulnerable thalamic neurons. This damage is responsible for long-term sequelae of brain trauma such as sleep disruption and epilepsy, and appears to be mediated primarily by the immune protein C1q. Notably, our ongoing preliminary studies suggest the female thalamus is relatively resilient to secondary injury. Might differences between female and male mouse brains hold the answers?
Where & When
Zoom Webinar
Thursday, October 19, 2023, 1:00 to 2:00 PM PT
About the Speaker
Jeanne Paz is an associate investigator at Gladstone Institutes. She is also an associate professor of neurology in the Kavli Institute for Fundamental Neuroscience at UC San Francisco.
Before joining Gladstone, Paz completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, where she identified seizure control points in the brain. Paz earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. As a graduate student, she studied the role of basal ganglia in regulating absence epilepsy and received an award for the best neuroscience PhD thesis in France.