Apostolos P. Georgopoulos
Keynote lecture
Will talk about: Brain Function in Healthy Aging
Apostolos P. Georgopoulos is Regents Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. He obtained his MD and PhD degrees from the University of Athens, Greece. He trained in neurophysiology with Vernon B. Mountcastle, at Johns Hopkins University, where he rose to the rank of Full Professor of Neuroscience in 1986. Dr. Georgopoulos is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Athens, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. He has pioneered the application of analyses based on neuronal populations to decipher brain activity underlying the planning of movement, cognitive processing, and, more recently, brain disease using magnetoencephalography. In that field, his most recent contribution has been towards elucidating the brain mechanisms underlying posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He has developed a novel, multimodal, comprehensive protocol for assessing brain, cognitive and language function which is currently being applied to a study of healthy brain aging in women.
In this lecture I will discuss brain function during healthy aging. I will focus on the interaction among neural population signals as a measure of vitality of brain network activity and show that this is well maintained throughout the lifespan. I will argue that, in the absence of disease, brain network function is kept at an adequate performance level even at advanced old age. Finally, I will discuss the influence of genetics on brain function, focusing on the effect of apolipoprotein E gene, as reported in a recent paper from our laboratory.
Leuthold AC, Mahan MYM, Stanwyck JJ, Georgopoulos A, Georgopoulos AP (2013) The number of cysteine residues per mole in apolipoprotein E affects systematically synchronous neural interactions in women’s healthy brains. Experimental Brain Research DOI 10.1007/s00221-013-3464-x.