Garrett Gibbons, PhD

Garrett Gibbons is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases Research (CNDR) at the University of Pennsylvania mentored by Drs. John Trojanowski and Virginia Lee. He earned his PhD in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Pathology at the University of Michigan and his Bachelor of Sciences in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from Michigan Technological University. Dr. Gibbons has a strong interdisciplinary background from screening small molecules and synthetic organic chemistry to chemical biology approaches dissecting signaling pathways in cellular models. His postdoctoral training has focused on neuropathology, developing novel tau antibodies, and using mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) to study the cell-to-cell transmission of tau protein. Since joining the CNDR at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Gibbons has generated a novel conformation-selective tau antibody that detects AD-tau pathology but not tau aggregates in other primary tauopathies and has utilized this tool to investigate the contribution of co-morbid AD in study of post-mortem tissue from 180 cases of frontotemporal lobar degeneration with tau (FTLD-tau). His research focuses on development of AD-specific biomarkers, engineering tau antibodies as immunotherapy candidates for AD, and seeking novel therapeutic targets for treatment of AD.