I’m Erica Weekman.
We’re in Sanders Brown, The Center of Aging here at the University of Kentucky.
The research that our lab focuses on is Alzheimer’s Disease and vascular dementia and the role
that inflammation plays in those.
My family and I are actually originally from Cleveland, OH and then we moved to Louisville
when I was 8.
I’ve always been interested in science, it’s just always something that I always
just understood and got, it was my best subject in school and so I did my undergraduate here
at the University of Kentucky and at first I actually wanted to be a doctor and then
got into research for my med school application and I just fell in love with it.
It was kind of the best thing for me, so I changed career paths and so that’s why I’m
here now.
I haven’t actually had a family member that’s affected by Alzheimer’s Disease, but I met
Donna and I found out about her research and I think it’s really important, especially
since Alzheimer’s doesn’t have a cure or treatment and I just— research is really
great for me, because you’re adding new knowledge, and basically, like, you’re putting
knowledge into a textbook for future generations and you could possibly contribute to a cure
so that’s what really drew me into research.
The project I’m working on right now for my PhD is, basically is what happens when
you have Alzheimer’s Disease and vascular dementia together and you just treat for Alzheimer’s,
does the vascular dementia have an effect or is it going to worsen any treatment for
Alzheimer’s and maybe that’s why our clinical trials for drugs aren’t working.
So that’s what my project is focusing on right now.
So, in order to look at this, I do a lot of immunohistochemistry for thing like microglia,
Amyloid beta, astrocytes.
We also do some histology so I’m looking at microhemmoraghes, specifically.
So, we do a Prussian blue stain that shows, like, little blue dots and those are microhemmoraghes.
We also do behavioral testing, so we do the Radial arm water maze.
I’ve actually also done some MRI on these mice, which is actually really cool to look
for microhemmoraghes and edema.
We actually work really closely with a lot of people here in Sanders Brown and I work
really closely with our lab manager, Tiffany, because she does a lot of the techniques and
she knows it really well.
We also work with the director of the center, Dr. Van Eldik on some of her research using
our vascular dementia model.
yea, so, big thing is our department does a retreat every couple of years, so all of
the faculty in the physiology department, all the students get together and we basically
try and, like, form collaborations between labs, and so there’s actually been like
papers that come out of that and that’s really cool.
And then scientific conferences, where we get together with other people at different
universities.
We get a lot of collaborations from that over basically drinks and pizza.
Well, I actually really want to become a professor at a university and to hopefully contribute
to a cure or treatment for Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia.
That’s my ultimate goal.
So to someone who is interested in science and research, I think I would have to say,
definitely try and talk to professors or science teachers, they’re really open to new students
and it’s not difficult and don’t be intimidated; they really want young students to get into
research and definitely take science courses, there’s a lot of programs out there for
science and research and it might not seem like it but if you dig a little bit, there’s
definitely a lot.