UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Janine Kwapis, Paul Berg Early Career Professor in the Biological Sciences and assistant professor of biology at Penn State, has been awarded the 2024 McKnight Brain Research Foundation Innovator Award in Cognitive Aging and Memory Loss by the American Federation for Aging Research and the McKnight Brain Research Foundation. This three-year, $750,000 grant will support Kwapis’s research project, “Improving cognitive flexibility in old age by fixing the transcriptome within memory cells.”
The goal of this program is to “identify emerging scientific leaders by building a cadre of outstanding research scientists across the United States to lead transformative research in the field of cognitive aging.” The additional award recipient is Sanaz Sedaghat, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota.
“The Innovator Awards underscore the McKnight Brain Research Foundation’s commitment to identifying and rewarding the outstanding scientists leading groundbreaking cognitive aging research,” said Michael L. Dockery, chair of the McKnight Brain Research Foundation. "With Dr. Kwapis and Dr. Sedaghat already demonstrating a strong commitment to the field, we are excited to support their work to better understand and prevent the effects of age-related cognitive decline and memory loss and hope their findings move us closer to our ultimate goal of helping people maintain their brain and cognitive health later in life.”
Kwapis’s project aims to better understand the molecular and cellular mechanisms that support the memory updating process.
“This award is really exciting for me, because it is going to allow us to move our research in a new and exciting direction,” Kwapis said. “It is very prestigious, and I’m honored to be selected and delighted that the McKnight Brain Research Foundation and American Federation for Aging Research are supporting our work and vision. This project aims to understand how changes in the transcription of genes might underlie age-related impairments in memory updating, an understudied but important aspect of cognitive aging. I hope that our work will identify novel targets to improve memory updating — and cognition, more broadly — in aging individuals.”
Kwapis’s previous awards and honors include a Hevolution/AFAR New Investigator Award in Aging Biology and Geroscience Research earlier this year, a five-year research grant awarded by the National Institute of Aging in 2022, a junior faculty grant from the American Federation for Aging Research and Glenn Foundations in 2021, and a Whitehall Foundation Award in 2020. She was also awarded a prestigious Pathway to Independence Award by the National Institutes of Health, which supported her research when she started her faculty position at Penn State in 2019.
“Janine is an outstanding researcher,” said Beth McGraw, head of the Department of Biology. “I am excited to see her leading this award focused on solutions for healthy aging — a condition fundamental to all humans.”
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Kwapis was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Irvine, from 2014 to 2018. She completed a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Alma College in 2006 and master’s and doctoral degrees in behavioral neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2010 and 2013, respectively.