Focus on the Faculty | NIH recognizes professor with innovator award

    As a new addition to the Tufts Medical School faculty, Assistant Professor Leon Reijmers is fitting in quite well, having received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's New Innovator Award last month.
    The NIH Director's New Innovator Award is given to 55 recipients annually. The award comes in the form of a research grant that offers far more flexibility on the part of the researcher than a normal grant. A body of scientists from universities across the United States selects successful applications from the applicant pool.
    According to Reijmers, the award works to give investigators a chance to do something innovative and to focus on research instead of spending years applying for funding.
    The award differs from a traditional research grant in that it does not require preliminary data and a detailed annual budget, according to the NIH Web site. But despite the fact that the grant is rather open-ended, Reijmers has a plan. "I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do," he said.
    Reijmers, who began teaching courses in neuroscience at Tufts on July 1 of this year, was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. Reijmers was involved in the study and investigation of memory storage long before that, as he performed such research as a graduate student in the Netherlands 14 years ago.
    While at the Scripps Research Institute, Reijmers worked to develop a transgenic mouse to visualize memory traces. Transgenic mice allow researchers to see which neurons are activated during memory formation.
    Memory traces are the connections neurons make with each other when storing new memories. To make these connections, neurons need to manufacture new proteins to act as "building blocks." However, researchers have not yet identified all the proteins involved in this process, something Reijmers hopes to be able to accomplish.
    Reijmers' research will look for which proteins are responsible for memory storage in the brain.
    "To achieve this we use a special mouse strain," Reijmers said in an e-mail to the Daily. "We have added genes to this mouse strain that allow us to locate neurons that participate in the storage of a memory. In addition, this mouse strain allows us to remove from those neurons molecules that are called messenger RNA. Messenger RNA is the blueprint for proteins. Our method allows us to see which blueprints a neuron is reading, and this tells us which proteins a neuron is producing."
    During the experiments, Reijmers and his colleagues teach mice novel information in order to facilitate the storage of a new memory. They look at time points after the mouse has learned something to see whether certain proteins are produced when a memory is old and when it is new. This can help tell researchers which proteins are used to help form the connections that lead to the storage of new memories and which are used for long-term memory storage.
    Reijmers hopes that his work will lead to better understanding of memory-related cognitive disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease.
    "There is growing evidence that memory impairments contribute to diseases like schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder," Reijmers said in an e-mail. "My work focuses on basic mechanisms of memory storage. These mechanisms need to be understood before effective treatments can be developed for these brain diseases."
    "We are honored that NIH has identified his work as having the potential to accelerate the research that will yield benefits to health," Michael Rosenblatt, the dean of the school of medicine, said in a press release.
    "I would like to thank everybody in the Department of Neuroscience here at Tufts. They have been extremely helpful with getting my lab started, and they make it a lot of fun to work here," Reijmers added in an e-mail.
    The NIH is a division of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. "Its mission is science in pursuit of fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to extend healthy life and reduce the burdens of illness and disability," according to its Web site.