Dr. Nancy J. Woolf

Dr. Nancy J. Woolf is Psychology Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
 
She works in the Laboratory of NanoNeuroscience where her research interests focus upon nanoscale structures in the CNS and the participation of these structures in higher cognition. Particular interests include:

• Cytoskeletal abnormalities in Alzheimer’s disease
• Microtubules and microtubule-associated proteins in learning and memory
• Microtubule-based models of cognition (information processing, attention, consciousness)
• Pharmacological strategies based on proteomics

Alzheimer’s disease, an aging-related disorder affecting memory and intellectual function, is associated with two types of neuropathology: senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. There is also a marked cholinergic deficit in forebrain cholinergic projection neurons. A major impetus underlying her primary research interests is how these pathologies and the cholinergic deficit are related. The fundamental basic science question is how acetylcholine impacts upon the cytoskeleton during higher cognition.
 
Nancy authored the innovative Amazon download Brain Teaser (Review): An article from: American Scientist, A Possible Role for Cholinergic Neurons of the Basal Forebrain and Pontomesencephalon in Consciousness, and Global and serial neurons form a hierarchically-arranged interface proposed to underlie learning and cognition, and coauthored Elevation of Nerve Growth Factor and Antisense Knockdown of TrkA Receptor during Contextual Memory Consolidation and Hippocampal microtubule-associated protein-2 alterations with contextual memory. Read her full list of publications!
 
Nancy earned a B.S. is Psychobiology from the UCLA Department of Psychology in 1978 and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the UCLA School of Medicine in 1983.