Welcome to the Latimer Lab

Our work lies at the intersection of neuropathology, neuroimaging, and molecular neuroscience. We investigate the mechanisms driving age-related neurodegenerative diseases, including Tauopathies (e.g. Alzheimer's disease), limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy, Lewy body pathology, vascular brain injury, and more. Because dementia in aging often involves more than one of these pathologies, we are interested in how these pathologies influence each other and the clinical expression of the disease. A major focus of our team is the interactions of multiple pathogenic proteins, such as tau and TDP-43, contribute to neurodegeneration, and how they impact the brain’s resilience to pathologic burden. To study these questions, we employ both quantitative neuropathology of post-mortem human brain tissue and mechanistic studies in model systems such as C. elegans. This enables us to link human disease with experimentally tractable systems. By integrating these diverse but complimentary approaches our research seeks to uncover the molecular and cellular pathways that drive cellular dysfunction, protein aggregation, and selective vulnerability in the aging brain. Ultimately, we aim to illuminate the complex interplay of disease-associated proteins and to identify potential avenues for diagnostic tools and therapeutic intervention in AD and AD-related dementias.