Latest published research shows what new neurons can restore in Huntington's, how targeting the brain’s immune system can impact Alzheimer’s disease, how people with autism process touch, and how temporary anxiety impacts learning.
4 FEATURE: STUDYING THE DEVELOPING BRAIN
The landmark ABCD Study is following adolescent brain development, offering insights that could transform education, mental health, and public policy.
8 FACULTY Q & A
John Onukwufor, PhD, is an assistant professor of Pharmacology and Physiology and Environmental Medicine. His research investigates the role of metal neurotoxicity and mitochondrial dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease pathogenesis.
9 STUDENT SPOTLIGHT
Yue Guzhang is a fourth-year student in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) Program. Guzhang works in the Active Perception Lab studying how attention and fixational eye movements influence our ability to see fine details in the fovea.
Brianna Leonardo, senior research coordinator of the ABCD Study site at the University of Rochester, with volunteer at the MRI in CABIN at the Medical Center.
The Long Game: Unraveling the Adolescent Brain
More than 11,000 kids across America are providing critical information about biological and behavioral brain development, including in Rochester
Mary Petersen was living in Utah with her husband and six children when an ad in the newspaper caught her attention. “I thought it was a fascinating research proposal that they were doing to really track the development of teenage brains,” said Petersen. “My husband is a researcher, so we understand the research process and the impact that it can make.”
The ad was for the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD Study), the largest longterm study of brain development and child health. Funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), 21 research sites across the U.S. started recruiting in 2015 and collecting regular data from more than 11,000 children in 2017, tracking their biological and behavioral development from adolescence into young adulthood.
Mary Petersen (right), walks with daughters Susannah, 16, and Elizabeth, 18, (left), who are two of the more than 11,000 participants in the ABCD Study.
Working For and With the Community
It takes more than family buy-in to have a study like this be successful. Each study site has a designated Community Liaison Board that acts as a touch point for stakeholders within the community. In Rochester, Laurence Wahl, director of strategic planning & secondary English Language Arts at the Webster Central School District, is one of five board members.
“I wanted to be a touch point of this group because of how compelling the research was,” Wahl said. “How cool it was that we could see all of these things that you wondered about before functional MRIs, but they allow you to see what’s taking place in somebody’s brain and then the practical application of building a better environment for learning to happen in school. The thing that gets me so excited about this is the prospect of serving kids in our classrooms more effectively. We only have them a short amount of time, and I’m greedy for never wasting a minute with our kids.”
Wahl and his team are often looking for modifiable risk factors—things as a district they can respond to that will better the learning and life of their students. Regular updates about findings from the ABCD study help with this approach. “I think when you get into physical development like what the ABCD study is looking at, and it backs up where emotional behaviors are coming from, it gives more tools to more people to understand better why kids do the things that they do, which means we're better able to help them navigate through difficult moments.”
Research Impacts
Learning
As the University began recruiting for the ABCD Study, the Webster Central School District was already making changes based on prior research around adolescence and sleep. In 2019, it became the first school district in Monroe County, New York, to swap the start times between its high schools and elementary schools. “In just the first semester, we saw attendance go up. We saw sports ineligibilities go down,” said Wahl. “And anecdotally, we saw teachers with many years of experience saying – this is remarkable, our kids are awake, and we can do things in the first period that we couldn't typically try to do in the first period.”
Laurence Wahl, Ed. D.
Courtesy Webster Central School District
Q&A with John Onukwufor, PhD
John Onukwufor, PhD, is an assistant professor of Pharmacology and Physiology and Environmental Medicine. He received his undergraduate degree in animal science from the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Nigeria Nsukka and continued to study animal reproduction and physiology for his master's. He studied Toxicology at the University of Prince Edward Island Charlottetown for his PhD. He completed a postdoc at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Vancouver in a comparative physiology laboratory to study stress adaptation in fish. He came to the University of Rochester in 2018 for his second postdoc position in the lab of Andrew Wojtovich, PhD, studying stress signaling at the molecular level using C. elegans. He was eventually hired as a research assistant professor. In 2021, he received the inaugural University of Rochester Transition to Independence Award, supporting his independent research project investigating the role of metal neurotoxicity and mitochondrial dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease pathogenesis.
Please summarize your research.
The Onukwufor laboratory is studying the role that metals, such as iron, play in neurotoxicity and mitochondrial dysfunction in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. My laboratory is also interested in understanding how genetic and environmental variables, such as temperature, metal, and hypoxia, interact to modulate cellular adaptation to stress. We use complementary approaches in transgenic overexpression C. elegans and mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease. In addition, we blend neuropharmacology, molecular biology, optogenetics, biochemistry, toxicology, and comparative physiology techniques. Our goal is to identify specific biological processes of the disease to develop novel therapeutic targets for Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders.
How did you become interested in your field?
I have always been curious about how things work. This curiosity drove me to pursue a career in science. Growing up in Nigeria, I attended the University of Nigeria Nsukka with the goal of building an efficient farm on minimal land. After college, I had a poultry farm for about three years. However, I was still curious about science and found the opportunity to pursue my PhD at the University of Prince Edward Island
Charlottetown, Canada. There, my research interests shifted from producing livestock for consumption to looking at their health and the environment. I was working with fish and looking at them at the mitochondrial level. This research led me to Andrew Wojtovich, and ultimately to Rochester.
What brought you to the University of Rochester?
Dr. Andrew Wojtovich recruited me to the University of Rochester as a Postdoctoral Fellow in his laboratory, where I used optogenetic approaches to gain mechanistic insights into mitochondrial ROS production and its role in stress signaling. Once I got to Rochester, I discovered the opportunities for early career researchers to grow—and the colloquial nature of the environment between colleagues and their trainees. This has made Rochester feel like home.
Is there anyone you are collaborating with or look forward to collaborating with and why?
I am collaborating with Dr. M. Kerry O’Banion in Neuroscience and Dr. B. Paige Lawrence from Environmental Medicine. They have been incredible mentors to me as an early career investigator. I see future collaboration opportunities with Dr. Marissa Sobolewski from Environmental Medicine, Dr. Ania Majewska from Neuroscience, and Drs. Scott Early and Houhi Xia from Pharmacology and Physiology.
What is your favorite piece of advice?
During my postdoctoral training at UBC, one of my mentors, Dr. Jeffrey Richards, said, “John, you have one shot, so make it count.” This has been my guiding principle to make every opportunity count. I also do my best to pass the one-shot statement to my trainees and mentees to see every opportunity as their last shot. By so doing, they are motivated to give their very best in whatever they do.
Yue Guzhang
Yue Guzhang is a fourth-year student in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) Program at the University of Rochester. She received her undergraduate degree in BCS from the University. Guzhang works with Associate Professor Martina Poletti, PhD, in the Active Perception Lab, studying how attention and fixational eye movements influence our ability to see fine details in the fovea.
“The foveal region is a tiny but crucial part of the eye that we rely on to focus and see fine details up close,” said Guzhang. “Even though the foveal region takes up a large portion of the brain’s visual processing area, it hasn’t been studied as much as other parts of our visual field, mostly because it's technically challenging to precisely track where people are looking.”
Guzhang has first authored two papers. The most recent study, published in Current Biology, found that just before tiny eye movements, known as microsaccades, happen, the ability to see fine details improves in a small area around the upcoming eye movement target. At the same time, visual sharpness slightly decreases the point of fixation. Her previous research, also published in Current Biology, found that, exogenous attention, the process that helps us quickly process important visual information, can also briefly enhance our ability to see fine details at the attended spot within the fovea. However, this enhancement diminishes over long periods, and sensitivity increases in other parts of the fovea that were not the initial focus.
The University of Rochester felt like the right community in the right climate for Guzhang when she decided to attend
for her undergraduate studies. Although initially undecided, she quickly chose BCS as her major after taking the Perception and Action course. “It was taught by Dr. [Duje] Tadin, and he spent a lot of time talking about visual perception, and it made me realize it is such a huge part of our life. Our eyes are always looking around, examining our surroundings. I realized there's so much inside the brain going on when we look out into the world, and I really wanted to know more about vision science and how we see things.”
Today, she is contributing to the intellectual foundation of the undergraduate program, which has served her well. In 2024, she received the Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Provost's office for co-developing and teaching an undergraduate programming course that teaches students how to use MATLAB—a programming language often used in research labs. “I think it's almost like giving back to the BCS community. I received a lot of help from the grad students in the lab when I was an undergraduate research assistant, and now, I can pass on some of this knowledge to help students gain necessary research skills.”
