John Broussard, Ph.D.
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Affiliation(s):
UT Health McGovern Medical School
ORCID URL:
Areas of Interest:
Alzheimer's disease, hippocampus, traumatic brain injury, Aging and Cognition, synaptic function
Biography & Research:
The focus of my research is to identify the neuronal and systems-based mechanisms underlying learning and memory and its disorders. We use a multidisciplinary approach that combines behavioral assays with in vivo electrophysiology, immunohistochemistry, and optogenetics to study learning and memory in neurological injury and disease. As a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of John Dani, Ph.D. (currently of UPenn) I provided the first neurophysiological evidence that dopaminergic projections to the hippocampus plays a crucial role in the in vivo synaptic plasticity and memory formation (Broussard et al., Cell Reports 2016). In a subsequent study (Zhang, Broussard, et al EJN 2017) we found that dopaminergic projections to the dentate hilus influences plasticity underlying learning in a novelty detection task. In 2016, I joined the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy of the University of Texas at Houston Medical Science Center as a Research Scientist in the laboratory of Pramod K Dash. We performed in vivo neurophysiology studies to test a novel line of investigation, whether mild fluid percussion injury impairs the ability of hippocampal circuits to form place fields (Broussard et al, 2020). My most recent project is to measure electrophysiological responses of the hippocampus in a rat model of neurodegeneration on cognitive performance and assessing various treatment protocols.
