Christine Dengler-Crish, Ph.D.

JAD profile

Affiliation(s): 

Northeast Ohio Medical University

Lab URL: 

http://ccrishlab.com

Areas of Interest: 

tauopathy, preclinical Alzheimer's, prodrome, risk factors, blood brain barrier, non-cognitive symptoms, visual system, retina, bone loss, exercise, cardiometabolic disease, irisin, VGF, integrins

Biography & Research: 

Christine Dengler-Crish received her Bachelors degree in Psychology from Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, Ohio and a Masters degree in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She completed a doctorate in Neuroscience at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN in 2008. Dr. Crish was then awarded a competitive two-year NIH postdoctoral fellowship in translational research at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital. She has been faculty at the Northeast Ohio College of Medicine (NEOMED) since 2012 where she is principal investigator of the CCrish Lab in Presymptomatic Neurodegenerative Disease. The main objective of the CCrish Lab is to identify the earliest therapeutic targets for preventing or slowing the dementia disease process-- years before the first signs of cognitive impairment even appear. To do this, our lab uses animal models to study how physiological stressors resulting from major midlife cardiometabolic risk factors for dementia (e.g. diabetes, hypertension, obesity) contribute to early blood brain barrier damage and the onset of tauopathy. We also investigate the mechanisms by which visual system function, skeletal remodeling, and energy balance are disrupted early in the dementia disease process, and what these mechanisms can tell us about disease etiology. Finally, all of our research aligns with the premise that sex differences are critical to understanding dementia etiology and treatment response—thus, we perform parallel investigations of all our studies in separate female and male samples using cutting-edge sex-stratified experimental designs and data analysis techniques. The CCrish Lab is an interdisciplinary team of graduate, undergraduate, pharmacy, and medical students, junior scientists, and experienced collaborators that span a wide range of expertise including neuroscience, biology, chemistry, pharmacology, psychology, behavior analysis, anatomy, microscopy, electrophysiology, and translational research.