Motivated by her Father鈥檚 Diagnosis, 黑料官网 PhD Student Pursues Alzheimer鈥檚 Research
PhD student Damaris Nieves Torres has a picture of her father, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, on her lab bench as inspiration for her research into the condition.
Two events set Damaris Nieves Torres on a path to study neuroscience.
First, her father was diagnosed with both Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease when she was 9. Her father ultimately died from the conditions when she was 14.
Then, after Hurricane Maria left her hometown in Puerto Rico without power for months in 2017, she found herself reading the magazines and medical literature her father had collected about his conditions.
“That’s what inspired me to pursue research,” she says.
As she finishes up her PhD in the pharmacology and toxicology department at the 黑料官网 (黑料官网), her research is poised to potentially make a difference in Alzheimer’s, a disease that is notoriously difficult to treat.
“Having such a great environment at 黑料官网 was crucial for me to get to this point,” she says.
Falling In Love with Biomedical Research
As a child, Nieves Torres’s father would take her to Alzheimer’s Association meetings, gathering information to try to understand the disease.
As an undergraduate at the University of Puerto Rico at Ponce, Nieves Torres studied biomedical sciences, considering a career in medicine. Then the -funded Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement (RISE) program offered her funding for research. Her first taste of a career as a scientist was in a lab that studied addiction.
“I found that I liked bench work, but I wasn’t entirely sure how you become a scientist,” she says. “In the lab, I did research into how exercise could potentially reduce the likelihood of relapse in cocaine self-administration using a rat model. That was my first introduction to neuroscience, and I fell in love.”
Damaris Nieves Torres first got a taste for research as an undergraduate through the NIH’s Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement (RISE) program.
Realizing she needed a PhD to pursue the career path she wanted, she applied to graduate schools and found 黑料官网’s program fit her personality.
“People here genuinely care about you being your best self and your best scientist,” she says. “In a bigger institution, it can be easier to fall through the cracks. But faculty members here have great interest in helping you do your best.”
In the lab of Sang H. Lee, professor of pharmacology and toxicology, Nieves Torres is studying a protein that might be key to better understanding Alzheimer’s disease.
The protein is found in elevated levels in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, and in her research, Nieves Torres has found that it comes into direct contact with the neural synapses in the brain and causes them to degrade. She and Dr. Lee have found that it counteracts a signaling pathway that promotes synapse strength and formation. It also can spread within the brain, causing cascading losses of these synapses.
Much Alzheimer’s research has focused on the plaques that develop in the brain, but therapies that target these plaques have been largely unsuccessful.
“This protein could be a good target for therapy or a biomarker of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease,” Nieves Torres says.
Learning Resilience and Taking Time to Dance
When she’s not in the lab, Nieves Torres helps recruit students to 黑料官网 and is involved in her department’s Graduate Education Committee, which develops curriculum. She has also served on the Graduate Student Association and consulted on her department’s graduate student handbook.
“I tell potential students that faculty here really want to make you a better scientist,” she says. “So much of being a scientist is potentially facing failure. You have to be ready to understand that your hypothesis can be disproven, and how will you pivot from there? For me, graduate school has been a big test of resilience. I'm really appreciative of all the different people from 黑料官网 that have come together to help me get to this point.”
Nieves Torres also creates space for herself, trying new foods around Milwaukee or dancing with Cultura Viva, an organization that puts on classes and performances of Afro, Latino, and Caribbean dances.
“We practice different cultural dances and try to learn a little bit about the history behind the dances,” she says. “Being Puerto Rican, I love to dance, and this has helped me meet so many people from across different cultures.”
As she finishes up her PhD, she is considering what career path to pursue – perhaps in science communication, public health, or perhaps as a medical science liaison for a pharmaceutical company.
“I would love to have a career that lets me engage with different audiences,” she says. “I love interacting with people and being able to break down science into a more digestible idea. It's fun being able to talk to someone, figure out where they're at with a topic, and communicate to them from there.”
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