For many scientists, the research journey begins in a classroom or behind a microscope. For Ryan Shahidehpour, PhD, it began in a boxing ring.
Before he ever wore a lab coat, Dr. Shahidehpour competed as a professional boxer and international lacrosse player, with over 250 fights under his belt. Despite years of high-impact competition, he never experienced a concussion. This sparked his curiosity about brain health and vulnerability to trauma.
While pursuing a bachelor’s and master’s degree in rehabilitation psychology and mental health counseling, he planned to work in clinical psychology. There was a growing public debate around chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain condition linked to repeated head injuries, which resonated with his own athletic experience. Around the same time, he took a course on the clinical impact of neurological diseases, which he credits with shifting his trajectory toward research.
After graduation, Dr. Shahidehpour joined the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Center at Northwestern University as a research technician in the lab of Changiz Geula, PhD. There, he studied mouse models of TDP-43 proteinopathies — key pathological features of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) — and gained his first hands-on experience in the world of neurodegenerative research.
Driven to deepen his understanding, he earned a doctorate in neuroscience at the University of Kentucky under the mentorship of Adam Bachstetter, PhD. His research, supported by a TRIAD T32 training grant, centered on dystrophic microglia and their role in Alzheimer’s and related dementias, highlighting the importance of neuroinflammation in disease progression.
Now a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Peter Nelson, MD, PhD, at the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, Dr. Shahidehpour continues to study age-related neurodegeneration, this time with a focus on Limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy (LATE), a type of dementia marked by TDP-43 pathology.
By combining advanced digital pathology tools with traditional techniques, Dr. Shahidehpour is working to uncover new insights into how neurodegenerative diseases progress at the cellular level and ways to distinguish diseases with shared pathology under the microscope.
“I’m incredibly grateful for the support and mentorship I’ve received at the University of Kentucky,” shared Dr. Shahidehpour. “The research happening here is truly at the forefront of understanding and treating neurodegenerative diseases, and I’m proud and humbled to be a part of it.”