Current Research and Scholarly Interests
The goal of the Buckwalter Lab is to improve how people recover after a stroke. We use basic and clinical research to understand the cells, proteins, and genes that lead to successful recovery of function, and also how complications develop that impact quality of life after stroke. Ongoing projects are focused on understanding how inflammatory responses are regulated after a stroke and how they affect short-term brain injury and long term outcomes like dementia and depression.
Ongoing projects focus on glial cells (astrocytes and microglia) and how they coordinate with immune cells from the blood to affect bystander brain injury in the days after stroke. We also study the brain blood vessel response to stroke in aging, and in longer term models of dementia. Finally, we are studying how conditions that co-exist in people with stroke affect these processes, for example obesity and hypertension.
In addition, we study all these processes in a clinical study that is a prospective cohort of people who have had a stroke. Participants in this "StrokeCog" study volunteer to donate blood, have brain scans, and have their cognition (thinking) measured yearly. We are continually using the collected data to learn more about what happens after stroke and to help us uncover important and treatable mechanisms that lead to post-stroke dementia and depression.
