Young-Pearse Lab

Optineurin deficiency disrupts phosphorylated tau proteostasis and clusterin expression in human neurons - Acta Neuropathologica Communications Optineurin (OPTN) is an autophagy adaptor protein involved in selective autophagy, including aggrephagy and mitophagy. Pathogenic mutations in OPTN have also been linked to amyotrophic lateral scleros...

New TYP lab publication from co-authors
Zach Augur and @garrettfogo.bsky.social
on deciphering the function of Optineurin in iPSC-derived Neurons and Astrocytes! This will be the first of 3 first-author publications from Zach's PhD thesis! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Best of luck today to @alexlish.bsky.social on her first day at Novartis! We will miss her greatly but look forward to seeing all of the fabulous things she accomplishes in her new scientific endeavors!

Honored to have our work featured!Huge thanks for highlighting our triculture Alzheimer’s model!

Huge congrats to @zacharyrmurphy.bsky.social selected as a 2025 Fujifilm Fellow at @harvard.edu 🎉

The Fujifilm Fellowship Program fully funds PhD students doing groundbreaking work in the life sciences!!

Huge shoutout to our brilliant graduate student @gizemterzioglu.bsky.social for delivering a fantastic talk at the HMS Neurobiology Pizza Talk series! 🍕🧠 She highlighted exciting insights into how SHIP1 shapes microglial function at the intersection of intracellular trafficking and immune response.

🧠 New study led by our talented graduate student Courtney Benoit, uncovers how the autism-linked gene POU3F2 supports brain development by promoting neural stem cell growth via Wnt signaling and key targets like ADNP and SOX13. Check it out here in Brain: academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

Highlights from our lab at the @keystonesymposia.bsky.social Neurodegeneration meeting!

@heuerwego.bsky.social delivered an excellent talk on ABCA7 loss and microglial dysfunction in Alzheimer’s

@alexlish.bsky.social presented a great poster on CLU and intercellular communication in Alzheimer’s

Astrocyte induction of disease-associated microglia is suppressed by acute exposure to fAD neurons in human iPSC triple cultures Lish et al. present a co-culture system of iPSC-derived human microglia, astrocytes, and neurons to investigate intercellular communication across different environmental and genetic contexts. Transcr...

New TYP lab publication led by PhD student @alexlish.bsky.social out today in @cp-cellreports.bsky.social! We present a reproducible neuron-astrocyte-microglia tri-culture model to better reproduce intercellular interactions in Alzheimer's disease. Read more here: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Proud of our amazing postdoc @heuerwego.bsky.social 👏 who gave a fantastic talk today on her work leveraging stem cell models 🧫to examine the molecular and functional consequences of Alzheimer's disease genetic risk in microglia today as part of the BWH Neuroscience Seminar Series!

We are proud to celebrate Tracy as the recipient of the Harvard Medical School Clifford Barger Excellence in Mentoring Award! 🎉 Her guidance, encouragement, and dedication mean so much to all of us. Congratulations on this well-deserved honor!

Thrilled to celebrate our incredible undergrad Ellie Grogan, who was awarded the Harvard Hoopes Prize for her exceptional senior thesis! 🏆📖 We’re so proud of her hard work and insight, and a great time taking her out to dinner to celebrate! 🎉🍽️

🎓Congratulations to our incredible grads! 🎉
Dr. Lish and outstanding undergrads Seohyun Kim & Ellie Grogan are officially Harvard alumni! 🥂
We’re so proud of all you’ve accomplished—and can’t wait to see what you do next! 💫 @alexlish.bsky.social

Huge congrats to our Master’s student Emma Karp for receiving the GBM Master Prize from the Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology! 🏆🧬
Emma earned it for her work in Biomedical Neurosciences at TUM! 🎓🧠
🔗 gbm-online.de/de/studium-k...

With the support of Dr. Frank Ondrey, the RADC is pleased to present the Martha Ondrey Postdoctoral Prize to Sarah Heuer, PhD.

Dr. Heuer presented on leveraging human stem cells to elucidate how polygenic risk affects cellular state transitions & communication networks in AD.

Big shoutout to our lab at the annual ROSMAP meeting in Chicago!

🎉 @heuerwego.bsky.social gave a great talk & won the Martha Ondrey Jr. Investigator Award 🏆

🧠 @gizemterzioglu.bsky.social crushed it with her presentation on SHIP1 & the inflammasome in microglia!

Excited to see our recent study featured on Alzforum! Thank you for highlighting our new study on how AD risk variants at the CLU locus lower astrocytic clusterin, disrupt neuroimmune crosstalk, and drive synapse loss. Read the full story here!

A big day for the TYP lab! Master's student Emma successfully defended her incredible thesis work today where she's been working with @gizemterzioglu.bsky.social on studying how SHIP1 regulates lysosomal function in microglia. She will be missed!

Some TYP members attended the BIGG meeting at UMass on Monday, and had a great time presenting talks and posters! PhD student @gizemterzioglu.bsky.social & postdoc @kelliannealexa1.bsky.social gave amazing short talks, Master's student Emma & postdoc @heuerwego.bsky.social got great poster traffic!

Tracy gave a great presentation at the 3rd Targeting Therapy of Alzheimer’s and Related Neurodegenerative Disease Conference in Chania, Crete! Huge thanks to Peter St. George-Hyslop, Li-Huei Tsai & Riqiang Yan for an incredible meeting. So many inspiring talks! #TargetAD25

CLU alleviates Alzheimer’s disease-relevant processes by modulating astrocyte reactivity and microglia-dependent synaptic density Genetic studies implicate clusterin (CLU) in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), yet its precise molecular impact remains unclear. Through u…

Thrilled to share my first first-author paper is out
@cp-neuron.bsky.social! We show that Alzheimer's disease protective CLU alleles upregulate CLU in response to neuropathology, dampening inflammatory signaling between microglia and astrocytes.

Read here www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

CLU alleviates Alzheimer’s disease-relevant processes by modulating astrocyte reactivity and microglia-dependent synaptic density Lish et al. reveal that AD-protective CLU alleles enhance CLU upregulation in response to accumulated neuropathology, thereby dampening inflammatory signaling between microglia and astrocytes. Using s...

New TYP lab paper out today in @cp-neuron.bsky.social led by PhD student @alexlish.bsky.social! We took a deep dive into the mechanisms underlying CLU in AD using innovative iPSC, mouse, and human data approaches. Be sure to give it a read!
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

Congratulations our newly-minted PhD candidate Olivia Pembridge on passing her PQE with flying colors today! Olivia will be using a wide array of iPSC and organoid models to study mechanisms of neurodevelopment!

Congratulations to TYP lab postdoc @kelliannealexa1.bsky.social on an amazing talk at the Cold Spring Harbor Barriers meeting!! Keep a lookout for all the cool work Kellie is doing with iPSC models of the BBB!

Congratulations to TYP lab Postdoctoral Research Fellow @heuerwego.bsky.social on being awarded a @brightfocus.bsky.social Alzheimer's Disease Research Fellowship! Sarah is using iPSCs to determine the cellular impacts of ABCA7 mutations in Alzheimer's disease!

Some members of the TYP lab had a great (and only mildly frigid) outing to Fenway to see the Red Sox play this week!

@gizemterzioglu.bsky.social will be presenting at the Microglia Symposium on the afternoon of April 4th! Her talk is titled "INPP5D/SHIP1 REGULATES MICROGLIA FUNCTION AND INFLAMMATORY RESPONSE IN ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE"

Zach Augur will be presenting a poster during Shift 1 on April 2nd and 3rd titled "BAG3 IN ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE AND ITS IMPACT ON ASTROCYTE FUNCTION AND DISEASE PROGRESSION"

If you're headed to #ADPD next week, be sure to stop by the TYP lab presentations by @gizemterzioglu.bsky.social and Zach Augur to learn about some of the amazing work the lab is doing!

Proud of our amazing postdoc @kelliannealexa1.bsky.social who gave a fantastic talk today on her work with neuronal hyperexcitability and modeling blood-brain-barrier dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease today as part of the BWH Neuroscience Seminar Series!

Congratulations to the newly minted PhD @alexlish.bsky.social on successfully defending her thesis today! Be on the lookout for all the amazing things to come from Dr. Lish!