Dr. Louise McCullough Honored at 2024 AHA ISC

02/26/2024

Published: February 26, 2024 by Jana Rosario

Dr. Louise D. McCullough, Professor and the Huffington Distinguished Chair of Neurology, was awarded the Thomas Willis Lecture Award at the 2024 American Heart Association International Stroke Conference. This prestigious award recognizes the awardee’s contributions to the investigation and management of stroke in basic science research. As the closing main event, the awardee presents a lecture on research within their designated field. Dr. McCullough presented “Aging, Sex, and Stroke: The Three Amigos of Brain Misadventures.”

Dr. McCullough is an internationally renowned physician-scientist whose pioneering work demonstrated sex differences in cell death pathways during stroke. Her work was instrumental to the National Institutes of Health’s requirement to include female animals in basic and translational studies. She has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association for over 20 years and has published extensively on aging and inflammation and how these factors contribute to vascular dementia. Currently, her lab is attempting to reduce age-related inflammation and brain injury in both the brain and peripheral tissues by using bone marrow transplantation and manipulation of the gut microbiome. Another area her lab is investigating is the mechanism by which social isolation increases mortality and impairs recovery after stroke.