News

Meredith Judy, Ph.D. Awarded the 2012 Bluefield Postdoctoral Fellowship

The Bluefield Project to Cure Frontotemporal Dementia congratulates Meredith Judy, Ph.D., recipient of the 2012 Bluefield Postdoctoral Fellowship for her proposal, “Genetic approaches to understanding granulin function.”

Dr. Judy received her undergraduate degree in biology with honors from Cornell University and completed a doctorate in neuroscience in Dr. Cynthia Kenyon’s lab at the University of California, San Francisco.

In 2010 Dr. Judy joined the lab of CFR Investigator Dr. Aimee Kao, where she is systematically dissecting the role of granulins in progranulin’s function. Human progranulin can be cleaved into seven and a half discrete yet related granulin domains. Dr. Judy speculates that changes in the balance of granulins, rather than intact progranulin, may underlie progranulin-deficient frontotemporal dementia. Using the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans, Dr. Judy aims to identify the functions of individual granulin domains as well as the downstream signaling molecules that mediate those functions.

Dr. Kao said, “In every way, Dr. Judy is the right individual to take on this important project and bring it to fruition.”

The Bluefield Postdoctoral Fellowship provides two years of salary support and is awarded annually to a postdoctoral fellow in a CFR member lab who is conducting basic, translational or clinical research on frontotemporal dementia.