Principal Investigator: Dr. Avindra Nath

Professor of Neurology

Dr. Avindra Nath is a board certified Neurologist who completed both his residency training in Neurology as well as a fellowship in Neuroimmunology at The University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. He then completed a second fellowship in Neurovirology at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland.

Currently, Dr. Nath is a Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, and is the Director of the Division of Neuroimmunology and Neurological Infections. He is also the Director the Neurovirology and Neuroimmunology Laboratory. The primary interests of Dr. Nath's lab are to understand the mechanisms by which neurodegeneration and immune dysregulation occurs in the setting of chronic viral infection of the brain; and the identification of therapeutic targets to restore neuronal and glial function despite chronic immune activation and viral infection.

The most common viral infection of the brain is infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the most common immune disorder of the brain is Multiple Sclerosis. In both of these disorders there is prominent neurodegeneration and glial cell activation. Hence the laboratory has developed experimental model systems for each of these diseases to identify common mechanisms of neuronal injury in these diseases. The laboratory uses cutting edge technology in proteomics, cell biology and genomics. The laboratory also takes advantage of well-defined clinical cohorts with each of these diseases and uses clinical samples from these patients to confirm the in vitro findings, to develop surrogate markers for diagnosis and prognosis of these diseases and to generate hypotheses that may be tested using experimental systems.

Additionally, Dr. Nath's lab has collaborated for several years with the University of Puerto Rico in the study of HIV dementia in women, which is funded through the NIH. In another NIH funded project the laboratory collaborates with the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore, India to explore the role of viral genetic differences in mediating dementia associated with HIV infection.

Link to Curriculum Vitae