American magazine, July 2016

AU is deep in the planning stages for an
ambitious construction project: the new
life sciences building. The complex will
give our 500 faculty and students the
technology, tools, space, and flexibility
to tackle the most pressing challenges
facing our city, country, and planet.
The building will foster interdisciplinary
collaboration and enable faculty to
undertake the groundbreaking research
that our current facilities can’t always
support. An excellent university must
have strong science programs. We
do—and with your support, we can
give our faculty and students the space
to generate new ideas, methods,
and discoveries.
Colin Saldanha wants to find ways to
regenerate the human brain. Our brains
heal extremely slowly after sustaining
significant injury; bird brains actually have
an easier time repairing themselves following
a traumatic event.
“Once something dies in the human brain
it’s extraordinarily difficult for it to come
back, which is one reason why it’s so difficult
to recover from a stroke if a certain amount
of damage has been done, and perhaps why
degenerative brain disease is degenerative. We
just don’t regrow our brains that well,” says
Saldanha, chair of AU’s biology department.
“The animals I study have no problem doing
so. Understanding how they do would be
helpful toward developing therapies that help
us to regenerate our brains.”
Saldanha is one of several world-class
science faculty members recruited by the
university to help build AU’s interdisciplinary
neuroscience program. This undertaking
is part of the AU 2030 initiative, a strategic
planning effort that identifies groundbreaking
areas for which AU can be nationally and
internationally recognized. It highlights
behavioral and cognitive neuroscience as one
of those areas.
Saldanha’s research focuses on how
estrogens are delivered to specific targets
in the brain, and how they help regulate
plastic processes such as memory. It has
implications for Alzheimer’s disease (from
which 5.4 million Americans suffer) and
other neurodegenerative diseases that
involve learning.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY PETER HOEY
46 AMERICAN MAGAZINE JULY 2016