Erica Underwood, PhD

Biography

Dr. Underwood is an Assistant Professor in the BRAINS Research Lab with the Department of Neurology at McGovern Medical School. For more than decade her research and training has focused on brain energetics Originally from Mississippi, she relocated to Texas in 2008 to pursue her doctoral degree at The University of Texas at Dallas studying the effects of high-fat diet on learning and memory. During her postdoctoral training, she became interested in mitochondrial dysfunction in models of traumatic brain injury. While a postdoctoral fellow at UT Health Sciences in Houston, she developed a method of high-throughput assessment of mitochondrial function using acute brain tissue sections. The refinement of this technique has allowed for the assessment of energetic changes at multiple time points and across discrete brain regions, thereby making it possible to create spatiotemporal ‘maps’ of mitochondrial damage.

Dr. Underwood has since utilized this technique in models of traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer’s disease, aging, spinal chord injury, and neonatal brain injury. She has consulted with laboratories across the United States and in Europe on utilization of whole tissue for mitochondrial assessment. Currently her research interests involve the manipulation of energetic input to improve metabolic output in the injured and aged brain.