Carlos Cruchaga, PhD, has received a 2022 Zenith Fellow Award from the Alzheimer’s Association. The annual award is given to scientists who have made significant contributions to the field of Alzheimer’s disease research and are likely to make additional, substantial contributions in the future. Funding attached to the fellowships also helps support high- risk, high-reward projects in Alzheimer’s disease research.
Cruchaga, the Barbara Burton and Reuben M. Morriss III Professor in psychiatry, is one of three Zenith Fellows selected this year and one of only 146 Alzheimer’s researchers chosen for the honor since it was created in 1991. That group includes three other scientists associated with Washington University: Alison M. Goate, DPhil, a former professor of psychiatry; David M. Holtzman, MD, the Barbara Burton and Reuben M. Morriss III Distinguished Professor of neurology and scientific director of the Hope Center for Neurological Disorders; and Randall J. Bateman, MD, the Charles F. and Joanne Knight Distinguished Professor of Neurology and director of the Knight Family Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network-Trials Unit (Knight Family DIAN-TU).
Cruchaga’s Zenith Fellowship Award will help fund extensive testing his lab is doing on brain cells, cerebrospinal fluid and plasma collected at the Knight Alzheimer Disease Research Center (Knight ADRC). He plans to characterize, in detail, the molecular profiles of all of those samples.
“Our goal is to identify the molecular changes — in gene expression, proteins, lipids and metabolites — occurring in these tissues because of Alzheimer’s disease,” Cruchaga said.