Biography
Denson G. Fujikawa is a neurologist and neuroscientist who has been a member of the UCLA faculty since he joined the Department of Neurology in as a clinical instructor in 1981. Dr. Fujikawa is at the Sepulveda VA Ambulatory Care Center. He became an Adjunct Professor in 1996, and has been a Staff Neurologist at Sepulveda since 1983. Dr. Fujikawa earned his A.B. degree magna cum laude in psychology at Harvard University, and his M.D. degree at the University of Southern California School of Medicine. He did two years of general surgery residency at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, two years of of neurosurgery residency at UCLA Medical Center, then switched to neurology, completing his residency at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in 1981. He then spent two years as a research fellow in Dr. Claude Wasterlain’s Epilepsy Research Laboratory at Sepulveda. He spends half his time in clinical neurology, training UCLA neurology residents, with a subspecialty interest in epilepsy, and half his time doing basic research on in vivo mechanisms of naturally occurring apoptotic and pathologically induced necrotic neuronal death.
Biography
Karen Hoppens Gylys is a neuroscientist who joined the faculty of the School of Nursing and the Brain Research Institute in 1998. Dr. Gylys earned a B.S. degree in Nursing and a M.S. degree in Human Development at the University of Texas, Dallas. She received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience, with a major in neuropharmacology, at UCLA in 1993, and did postdoctoral work on molecular mechanisms of opioid tolereance in the NPI. Since joining the faculty of the School of Nursing, she has taught pharmacology and research in the School of Nursing and is actively involved in the BRI. Her laboratory research is focused on understanding the dysfunction and loss of synapses that occurs in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and she has pioneered the use of flow cytometry for the analysis of synaptosomes. Her projects use primarily human postmortem AD samples and mouse models of the disease. Research interests include neuroinflammation and APOE risk for AD, the single biggest genetic risk, which can also be also protective. Recent projects have isolated brain cell types from human postmortem samples in order to study microglial and astrocyte effects on AD progression. We also have new projects looking at exosome mechanisms in pathology and signaling between cortical cell types.