Age: 29
BS/MS biomedical engineering ’10
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, doctoral candidate
Dheeraj Roy’s study of brain changes that occur early in Alzheimer’s disease may help to unlock the mysterious way that Alzheimer’s works against memory.
With all the resources spent on Alzheimer’s research to date, is it possible scientists have been looking in the wrong place all this time? Neuroscientist Dheeraj Roy thinks so.
“For the past 100 years people have been trying to figure out a way to slow [memory loss] down or to rescue cognitive skills, but even today we don’t know what is going wrong at the earliest stages,” says Roy. “When we look at a dementia patient we see signs of tissue loss, we see people with missing parts of the brain. We know about that, but before that stage there can be five to 15 years where all we know is that something is changing, but we don’t really know what is happening.”
First as a Drexel student, where he completed a joint BS and MS in biomedical engineering in 2010, and now as a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Roy has been exploring these early-stage phenomena, hoping to get at the very genesis of memory loss.
Born and raised in an Indian household in Dubai, Roy says his Drexel experience had a profound impact.
“The first year at least was very tough because people didn’t understand what I was saying a lot of the time. It took several years to get used to using the language. And there was the food, those kinds of adjustments. I was homesick,” he recalls.
On the positive side, the social isolation helped him turn around a history of mediocre study habits.
“I had never been a really good student, I never worked hard, I skipped class. But when I came to Drexel something clicked,” he says. “I got into academics, I started working in the research lab. Maybe it was because of being lonely, being away from home. I think maybe the shock of it all helped me to change my path.”
That newborn academic passion set him on a course for excellence. He conducted successful lab experiments at Drexel and has built a strong track record at MIT, where he expects to defend his thesis this spring. After that he’s planning a post-doc at the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute, a renowned biomedical and genomic research center.
Roy’s work has been published in the journals Science and Nature, a reflection of his success using mouse models to show that the early workings of Alzheimer’s disease may be different than scientists had suspected.
Conventional wisdom has held that the brain loses the ability to store memory once Alzheimer’s sets in. Roy’s work has shown that in fact memory capture continues. It may even be possible to gain access to these memories, under the right circumstances.
“For the first time in the field of early Alzheimer’s, people have started to say that maybe we are missing something in the early memory-impairment studies,” he says. “Maybe the memory is fine, and the problem has to do with retrieval.” — Adam Stone