Dr. Eric Wang wins $2.5 million dollar Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Award

Eric Wang, PhD
Eric Wang, PhD

Congratulations to CNG Researcher Dr. Eric Wang on receiving the very prestigious Ben Barres Early Career Acceleration Award from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. This is an outstanding achievement and will provide Dr. Wang’s lab with $2.5 million to pursue his innovative research on RNA biology and cellular trafficking in neurodegenerative disease. We are thrilled to have Eric as a member of our Center for NeuroGenetics and are looking forward to seeing where his research goes next.

Altered RNA Localization and Local Translation in Neurodegeneration
Eric Wang, PhD University of Florida Gridlock in the Nervous System

PROJECT DETAILS: Many neurodegenerative diseases exhibit intracellular “traffic jams,” or disrupted transport of proteins and RNA. However, we know little about how transport machinery chooses its cargoes. Our work seeks to elucidate rules for how cargoes are chosen, for example, which RNAs and proteins are carried by which motor proteins. The composition of intracellular cargoes is often disrupted in a subset of neurodegenerative diseases caused by expansions in repetitive DNA sequences, such as Huntington’s Disease, Myotonic Dystrophy, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). While mouse models have provided insights into disease pathogenesis, repetitive sequences in mice do not expand quickly enough to model human disease over decades. Therefore, we propose to accelerate repeat expansion to better model neurodegenerative processes. In summary, both efforts — elucidation of how cargoes are trafficked, and acceleration of repeat expansion in vivo — will provide important insights into neurodegeneration.