Researcher Spotlight: Kathryn Lenz

Kathryn Lenz, Ph.D., The Ohio State University Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research, was awarded a seed grant of $25,000 for her project “Pediatric TBI effects on long-term myelination: sex specificity and neuroimmune modulation.”

Project Information

Project Title: “Pediatric TBI effects on long-term myelination: sex specificity and neuroimmune modulation”

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is the leading cause of pediatric emergency room visits. Boys are more likely than girls to experience early-childhood TBI, which can lead to sex-specific risks for subsequent psychiatric disorders. Neuroimmune cells mediate healthy brain development, are sexually dimorphic, and their function is perturbed by TBI. Using a preclinical rat model of TBI, we will assess sex-specific inflammatory function and determine how brain myelination and motivated behavior are impacted, to discover new potential strategies to treat or prevent long-term outcomes of childhood TBI.

What compelled you to make the career choice you have as a research scientist?

I have been interested in how the body works since I was a very young child. Those interests were probably fostered by my grandfather who was a physician, but I was very curious about anatomy and different diseases. As I grew older, family members that suffered from the negative effects of mental illness, brain injury and neurological disorders like migraine headaches made me gravitate toward understanding how the brain worked. I first thought I would be a physician but research experiences in college made me realize I enjoyed and was better suited for being part of making new discoveries as a researcher than the patient care side of things.

How has support from the Brain Injury Association of America helped you achieve your research goals?

This support has allowed me to branch into a completely new field of research! My research background is in brain development and how early life experiences like stress and infection can program sex differences in the risk for long-term social and emotional outcomes. I had never studied brain trauma before this, but I realized that TBI in early life is extremely common and can also lead to both short and long-term risk for negative social, emotional, and cognitive outcomes in kids. Therefore, BIAA seed funding gave me an opportunity to potentially affect a completely new group of vulnerable kids by discovering new interventions or therapeutic strategies.

What message do you have for donors supporting the Brain Injury Research Fund?

Donations to the Brain Injury Research Fund are used to support new lines of research, bring in a new voice to the injury research community, and can allow researchers to pursue a discovery or therapeutic strategy that they otherwise would not be able to study, which could change our ability to prevent or treat brain injuries across the life span.

Why is it important to support brain injury research?

Brain injuries are extremely common, including in children, and yet we know so little about how the brain responds both short and long-term after injury. Funding basic studies of brain injury research give us a better idea of how the brain can repair itself, how it needs support to repair and recover, as well as understanding which individuals may be more at risk or resilient to other health consequences after injury so that we can tailor treatment to individuals.

What else would be helpful for our community of donors and supporters to know about your work?

My work is very focused on understanding sex differences in the response to injury because the biology of girls and boys, and men and women, has important differences that could impact risk, resilience, and recovery. Understanding sex differences in TBI outcomes could lead to better outcomes for everyone.

After you complete the research that this grant supports, what new platform of information do you hope to have for you to base your next research grant upon? What is your expectation that the next research project will seek to reveal or determine?

My plan is to continue our work focused on how immune cells regulate brain development differently in males and females after early TBI, with a focus on myelination and development of two circuits in the brain: the circuit that regulates social behavior and the circuit important for the stress response. We are also now pursuing the question of whether early life adversity is a risk factor for TBI later in life.

What opportunities exist to impact practice or policy with your research? 

We hope that our studies will impact how children are treated in classroom settings after TBI, understanding that long-term outcomes after pediatric TBI can be hard to detect but pervasive. We also hope to emphasize that understanding that sex differences are important to take into account in basic research and in the clinic could impact the quality of post-TBI care that children receive.

About Kathryn Lenz

The major goals of my research program are to understand how brain and behavioral development are sensitive to experience and understand sex differences in brain function and behavior across the life span. Currently my laboratory focuses on the role that brain-resident innate immune cells, such as microglia and mast cells, play in regulating brain development and plasticity in males and females across the life span and in response to perturbations such as inflammation and stress. As a PI, I have received two R21 awards from NIMH to assess innate immune cells and their role in brain function and behavior, as well as a NARSAD Young Investigator award. I have published 20 research articles on the mechanisms that govern sex-specific nervous system development and behavioral function, most recently with a focus on the innate immune system in the brain. I am currently an Associate Professor of Psychology at the Ohio State University, with appointments in the Department of Neuroscience and the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research. I take a multisystem approach to studying brain plasticity, understanding how individual and sex differences in behavior are shaped by the interaction between the nervous system, endocrine system, and immune system. I have focused my research career on understanding how early life perturbations, such as stress or inflammatory challenges during gestation or neonatal period, impact sex-specific neuroimmune function, brain development, and behavior. My research program will ultimately contribute to the understanding of many brain disorders that show sex differences in prevalence, as well as establish the potential mechanisms through which the brain is sensitive to stress and inflammation. My experience within vivo assessment of microglial phenotype, and systems neuroscience/neuroendocrine techniques, including brain anatomy and histology, hormonal manipulation and assessment, behavioral experiments, and analyses will be integral to the success of the current proposed studies, as will my expertise in assessing neuroimmune and anatomical outcomes in the immature brain acutely after perturbations. This experience is directly applicable to this project focused on another early life perturbation that has been much less studied, pediatric traumatic brain injury.

Education

Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Neuroscience, University of Maryland, Baltimore, 2013; Doctor of Philosophy in Neuroscience and Psychology, Indiana University, 2009; Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, Kalamazoo College, 2003

---

Click here to learn more about the Research Grants Program.