Erin Reed-Geaghan, PhD

Erin Reed-Geaghan, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Northeast Ohio Medical University. Dr Reed-Geaghan graduated from Colby College with a bachelor’s degree in biology and an interest in preventing the memory loss that occurs in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients. She earned her doctoral degree from Case Western Reserve University, where she worked with Dr Gary Landreth to identify how the brain’s immune cells recognize amyloid beta and mount an immune response. Dr Reed-Geaghan’s post-doctoral training continued at Case Western Reserve University, where she worked with Dr Stephen Maricich to focus on mouse genetics and developmental neurobiology studying cellular development and maintenance programs. With these new skills and perspectives, she returned to the field of AD and identified the immune cells responsible for the inflammatory response in AD as the ones that have been there since development and not ones from the circulation that have entered the brain during disease. After a brief stint as a project manager for the Harrington Discovery Institute where she helped academic labs translate their scientific discoveries into new medicines, she started her own lab in 2019. The central focus of Dr Reed-Geaghan’s laboratory is to understand the immune response in AD, with the ultimate goal of harnessing these findings to develop effective therapies for Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders.