Improving Cognition in People with Down's Syndrome
Background
Dr. Roger Reeves is a professor of physiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Reeves is also on faculty at the McKusick-Nathans Institute for Genetic Medicine.
He has studied various aspects of Down syndrome for the last 25 years. He is currently the principal investigator of the Down Syndrome Cognition Project, which researches the combinations of genes in one’s genetic background that might lead to the predisposition for the DS effect to be more or less severe and why development works differently in one has DS than if one does not.
Dr. Reeves and his lab use chromosome engineering in ES cells to create defined dosage imbalance in order to localize the genes contributing to these anomalies and to test directly hypotheses concerning Down syndrome "critical regions" on human chromosome 21.
Dr. Reeves received his B.S. from Bowling Green State University in 1975 and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1983. His postdoctoral work took place at Johns Hopkins University and he joined the faculty in 1983.
Among other honors, Dr. Reeves was awarded the Sisley-Lejeune Award for Translational Research in Intellectual Disabilities in 2012.