Tracy Young-Pearse is an Associate Professor in Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She received her undergraduate degree from Skidmore College and then entered the Biomedical and Biological Sciences (BBS) program at Harvard Medical School (HMS) earning her PhD in Genetics under the mentorship of Constance Cepko. She completed her postdoctoral training with Dennis Selkoe and established her independent lab in 2010 in the ARCND. She is the co-Director of the Human Nervous System Diseases Program of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and is the Vice Chair of Basic Research in Neurology at BWH. She also is a member of the FNIH funded Accelerating Medicines Partnership Program for Alzheimer’s Disease (AMP-AD) from its launch in 2014.
The Young-Pearse lab focuses on the identification of the mechanistic causes of neurodegenerative and developmental disorders of the nervous system, with the ultimate goal of identifying novel targets for therapeutic interventions for these diseases. The lab uses human stem cells, rodent models, and primary human tissues to study the impact of genetic risk and resilience factors on the biology of cells in the brain.