Kim Green, Ph.D.

Dr. Kim Green is Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California, Irvine. To date, his research has resulted in 81 peer-reviewed articles which have collectively been cited more than 23,000 times. He conducted his Ph.D. in Cellular Neurophysiology at the University of Leeds in the UK exploring the link between hypoxia and the production of the Ab peptide implicated in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease. Following this, he explored various environmental factors and the development of Alzheimer’s disease using transgenic mouse models of the disease, including diet, stress, and cognitive exercises. Furthermore, he identified several therapeutics that progressed into human clinical trials, including nicotinamide, and ST101. Over the past decade his work has focused on the immune cells of the brain, known as microglia, and developed approaches based around the colony stimulating factor 1 receptor (CSF1R) to modulate this tissue. In the Alzheimer’s disease brain these microglia surround the amyloid-plaques, mounting a sustained inflammatory attack that lasts for the duration of the disease. Through this approach his work has uncovered various roles that these cells play in Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, including their facilitation of synaptic and neuronal loss, as well as in the development of amyloid-plaques in the first place. These findings show that targeting dysfunctional microglial populations with the right approaches should have the ability to slow or prevent multiple facets of Alzheimer’s disease pathogenesis.