UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Janine Kwapis, Paul Berg Early Career Professor in the Biological Sciences at Penn State, has been selected to receive a Hevolution/AFAR New Investigator Award in Aging Biology and Geroscience Research from the American Federation for Aging Research. The three-year, $375,000 grant will support Kwapis’s research on understanding age-related impairments in how memories are updated, an understudied aspect of the aging process.
The grant program is designed to enable early-career investigators to advance research projects in the basic biology of aging and geroscience — a research paradigm based on addressing the biology of aging and age-related diseases to promote healthy aging.
“The Hevolution/AFAR New Investigator Awards in Aging Biology and Geroscience are a vital catalyst to support … early-career scientists, whose work is essential for pioneering new pathways to extend healthspan," said Felipe Sierra, chief science officer of Hevolution Foundation.
In her research, Kwapis uses a combination of behavioral techniques, molecular analyses and genetic and epigenetic manipulations to understand how long-term memories are formed, stored and updated in the brain as well as how these processes change during aging. With the new grant, Kwapis’s lab will specifically explore how dysregulation of an enzyme called histone deacetylase HDAC3 impacts how memories are updated.
“I am honored to receive this award and grateful to AFAR and Hevolution for supporting our work,” Kwapis said. “This award will allow us to dig into the mechanisms that go awry in old age, leading to age-related impairments in memory updating and memory flexibility. Ultimately, we hope this work will identify new targets to improve memory updating in both normal aging and in Alzheimer’s disease.”
Kwapis’ previous awards and honors include a junior Faculty Grant from the American Federation for Aging Research and Glenn Foundations in 2021, a Whitehall Foundation Award in 2020 and a recent five-year R01 research grant from the National Institute on Aging in 2022. She was also awarded a prestigious K99/R00 from the National Institutes of Health that supported her research when she started her faculty position at Penn State in 2019.
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.