9th Annual Mariann Blum Memorial Lectureship in the Neurosciences

March 23rd, 2012 - 4:00 PM - Long Campus Medical Bldg Room 209L

Dr. Mariann Blum (pictured right) was a native Houstonian and biochemist who focused on how neurons damaged by Parkinson's Disease can be stimulated to survive or regenerate. Her scientific work also changed the way neuroscientists think about the brain. Her careful analysis of the levels of the growth-factor genes throughout the development of the brain found that levels actually were highest in the adult animal. This led to the observation that growth factors continued to be very important in the brain, even after it was fully formed. Blum published more than 60 peer-reviewed papers and reviews in her too-short scientific career, supervised five doctoral candidates, and trained more than 12 post-doctoral fellows and visiting faculty members.

Known to most of her friends as "Poco," she received a BS in biochemistry from the University of Texas at Austin in 1977. In 1982, she earned a doctorate in biochemistry at the UT Medical Branch in Galveston. In the same year, she enrolled in the Rockefeller University in New York as a post-doctoral student of the renowned neuroscientist, Dr. Bruce McEwen. Appointed to the adjunct faculty at Rockefeller, she also trained in molecular neurobiology in the laboratory of Dr. James Roberts at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Blum joined the faculty of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York in 1986 as an assistant professor in the Dr. Arthur M. Fishberg Research Center for Neurobiology. In 1993 she rose to the rank of associate professor with a secondary appointment in the Department of Geriatrics and Adult Development. In 2002, she became Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio with an appointment in the Audie L. Murphy Memorial Veterans Hospital. Throughout her career, her research was funded by grants from the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke and the National Institute of Aging.

This year's guest speaker will be Catherine S. Woolley, Ph.D. (pictured left), a Professor with the Department of Neurobiology at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. Dr. Woolley is researching how ovarian steroid hormones like estrogen and progesterone affect the brain. Her lab explores the roles of these hormones in neural plasticity - or the capacity for change in the structure and function of brain circuitry. 'Our work focuses primarily on the hippocampus, a part of the cerebral cortex that is normally involved in learning and memory and that can be a focus of seizure activity under abnormal conditions. We study how changing levels of estrogen and progesterone alter the way neurons in the hippocampus are physically connected to one another and how these physical changes can modify the flow of electrical activity through the hippocampus. We use a variety of brain imaging and electrophysiological recording techniques to understand the functional consequences of hormone-induced structural changes. Our findings may help to explain how hormones affect both normal cognitive processing as well as susceptibility to seizures'.

She will be presenting her lecture titled: 'Rapid Synaptic Actions of Estrogens'