Honored & excited to receive this young investigator award from the IDSA to explore the implication of gut microbial pathogenesis in Alzheimer's disease.

Dr. Ravinder Nagpal, Assistant Professor in the Department of Nutrition & Integrative Physiology, is awarded an early-career investigator grant by the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) Foundation’s to explore a potential link between infectious diseases and the causation of Alzheimer’s disease. The award will fund ($30,000) a one-year exploratory project to examine the implication of microbial pathogenesis in neuropathogenesis and investigate how intestinal colonization and infection by specific pathogenic bacteria may trigger or worsen Alzheimer’s pathology via the gut-brain axis. Dr. Nagpal aims to examine if there is a role for specific opportunistic gut pathogens, such as Proteobacteria, Enterobacteria, Klebsiella, or Candida, in Alzheimer’s neuropathogenesis, and if so, then what mechanisms are involved therein. If found true, these findings will provide a new line of evidence to prove his hypothesis that Alzheimer’s disease does have a link to infectious diseases or a microbial mechanism, thereby paving the way for further larger studies to address Alzheimer’s from an infectious disease perspective.