Neuroscience of Cognitive Aging

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 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Modern neuroscience has the potential to significantly contribute to meeting current and future social challenges related to the advancing age of the population. In order to maintain health and autonomy in old age, understanding of the basic mechanisms of aging processes are of the utmost urgency. Deciphering the changes in neural structure and function of the healthy brain throughout the entire life span is essential for developing new approaches for diagnostics, prevention, therapy and health care. Based on newly acquired knowledge about the basic mechanisms of aging appropriate training measures and interventions can be developed. As a consequence, the need for the infusion of new and highly creative young scientists into this area of research has never been more acute. The aim of this T32 training application, therefore, is to develop a highly diverse, but integrated program of neuroscience research that aims to understand the biological underpinnings of the aging brain as it relates to cognition across the spectrum of human brain aging. To accomplish this goal, we propose to bring together the outstanding neuroscience research and education resources of UC Davis in a synergistic and collaborative manner to train new post-doctoral students (3 per year - 3-year training programs, total of 6 trainees over 5 years). These trainees will serve as catalysts for translational neuroscience research on cognitive aging, and this program will bring added value to the UC Davis aging research community by bringing together disparate but complimentary faculty and laboratories and generating newly funded research related to advancing science to improve human health.