Associate Professor Doug Smith is a passionate neurobiologist who received research training in three countries before establishing his own independent group in Newcastle.
He is determined to understand the impacts of aging on the brain to achieve the long-term goal of prevention of dementia. His group uses data driven-approaches, thereby pursuing whichever lines of evidence-based research is indicated, and not being constrained by existing group expertise. This has involved initial discovery-driven approaches such as genomics, lipidomics, and proteomics, that are then confirmed by more targeted approaches.

A major goal of the group’s research is to understand how aging, the largest risk factor for dementia, causes the dysregulation of cholesterol in the brain. Cholesterol has long been implicated in dementia but its precise role has not been adequately understood. Another aging-related factor implicated in dementia is brain inflammation (neuroinflammation – neuroinflammaging).
Associate Professor Smith’s research group has shown this neuroinflammaging is associated with, at least in part, increased expression of viral sequences that have been incorporated into the nuclear genome over the millennia. Intriguingly, the aging-related neuroinflammation appears to be reduced with long-term intermittent fasting. The group are presently confirming and expanding on these early findings.

It is hoped Associate Professor Smith’s teams’ work will eventually lead to a better understanding of the early stages of dementia such that effective interventions can be developed and implemented.