John Lawrence, PhD
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Affiliation(s):
Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center
Areas of Interest:
Nutrigenomics, cellular and synaptic physiology of Alzheimer’s disease, role of excitation/inhibition balance in disease states, hippocampal learning and memory circuitry, GABAergic inhibition, cell type specificity of neuromodulation, antioxidant depletion over lifespan, neuroinflammation, effects of diet on healthy aging, computational neuroscience, bioinformatics
Biography & Research:
Dr. Lawrence is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Neuroscience at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC). He received his B.S. from Allegheny College in 1992 and Ph.D. from the Neuroscience Training Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999. His laboratory has historically focused on learning and memory operations within the mammalian hippocampus. As a postdoctoral fellow and staff scientist at the NIH, he focused on specific circuits in the hippocampus. As an Assistant Professor at the University of Montana, his NIH/NINDS-funded laboratory focused on understanding how synapses from the medial septum-diagonal band of Broca (MS-DBB) impact the excitability of specific hippocampal cell types. Since joining TTUHSC, he has become affiliated with the Garrison Institute on Aging, the Center of Excellence for Translational Neuroscience and Therapeutics, and the Center for Excellence in Integrated Health, which provided him with an integrative understanding of how Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathogenesis impacts learning in the hippocampus. He is currently funded through two NIH/NIA R01 grants that investigate the relationship between vitamin A status and Alzheimer's disease. He maintains several active research collaborations with TTU faculty across Engineering, Biology, Nutritional Sciences, and the Center for Biotechnology and Genomics.
