Grant: Doctoral: Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships

With a rapidly aging population, dementia is becoming a global crisis with no promising remedies. Presently, we still do not have either the prognostic or therapeutic arsenal to be able to halt or even significantly slow down dementia progression. Aberrant sphingolipid metabolism is linked to risk of dementia in a number of age-related neurodegenerative disorders, yet the critical metabolic pathways responsible for cognitive decline are unknown. Here, I propose to: 1) Determine how specific disruptions in sphingolipid metabolism act synergistically with pathological protein accumulation to cause cognitive decline; 2) Establish whether these metabolic changes are modulated by age and sex; and 3) Assess if targeting critical sphingolipid pathways can delay learning and memory impairment in experimental models of Lewy Body Dementia and mixed Alzheimer's Disease (AD)/Lewy Body Disease.