URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Spring_2018_Melissa-McCarthy

Regina Kim, research assistant, George & Anne Ryan Institute for Neuroscience.

“The challenge now is to identify individuals developing the disease when they are younger so interventions can have a more meaningful impact on the process and prevent further progression.” - William Van Nostrand

summer, joined the University of Rhode Island (URI) George & Anne Ryan Institute for Neuroscience, as URI’s Hermann Professor of Neuroscience. Like his neuroscience career, his decision to relocate his lab to Kingston — including four lab staff, a student and four NIH grants totaling $1.7 million — was not something he anticipated. “I wasn’t looking to leave Stony Brook,” says Van Nostrand. “But [Ryan Institute Executive Director] Paula Grammas invited me to come for a visit, and I was impressed with what I saw. It was an intriguing opportunity to help grow the institute and start some new collaborations.” He studies the amyloid precursor protein that generates amyloid-beta, which accumulates in the tissues and blood vessels of the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and contributes to the memory loss and cognitive decline

William Van Nostrand’s career as a neuroscientist started by accident. As a graduate student studying biochemistry at the University of California, Irvine, he successfully worked to isolate and characterize an unknown protein. Simultaneously, research into Alzheimer’s disease had begun to take off, and researchers made an important discovery about a protein implicated in causing the disease — the same protein that Van Nostrand was studying. “I started out working on a protein that nobody was interested in, and it became a protein that everyone was interested in,” he recalls. “That became my side-door entry into the field of neuroscience.” He’s been studying that protein ever since, first as a postdoctoral researcher and faculty member at UC Irvine, then as a professor of neurosurgery at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine for 22 years. And as of last

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