Welcome to the Kummer lab
The Kummer lab is working to better understand the mechanisms of cellular damage in traumatic brain injury and in Alzheimer’s disease. We are particularly focused on the ways trauma and neurodegeneration affect synapses, the gray matter nodes at which neurons communicate to form functional networks.
Traumatic brain injury is the major cause of neurological morbidity and mortality for individuals in the first half of life, and the best established environmental risk factor for the development of Alzheimer’s disease, the scourge of the second half of life. We recently developed a new method to quantify synapses called SEQUIN, and applied this technique to identify synaptic loss after TBI. We are now working to reveal the relationship between this process and dementing illnesses.
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Principal Investigator
Terrance T. Kummer, MD, PhD
Terrance Kummer is an Associate Professor of Neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, a clinical neurointensivist in the Barnes-Jewish Hospital Neurological and Neurosurgical intensive Care Unit, and the Director of the Neurotrauma ICU. Kummer received his MD and PhD from Washington University in St. Louis where he studied synaptogenesis at the neuromuscular junction.
Kummer now focuses on identifying and measuring the key loci of cellular injury in TBI and Alzheimer’s disease with a particular interest in synaptic and other forms of CNS gray matter injury. Kummer was born and raised in Rochester, Minnesota, and completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota.
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