Jonathan Geiger, PhD, Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor and Chair
Pharmacology, Physiology, and Therapeutics
Jonathan Geiger, who received his Ph.D. in pharmacology and physiology right here at UND, still spends a lot of time in the lab, working on a project that someday will lift the veil on the mysteries of Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders—there’s no cure for any of them right now.
Geiger is the principal investigator on a $10.3 million neuroscience center development grant which continues to help support a very talented group of neuroscience investigators here at UND through a Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) grant from the National Institutes of Health.
Geiger’s research—especially his findings about how caffeine intake may help to stave off Alzheimer’s—has been widely noted by scientific colleagues and in global media—and it’s gotten him rave reviews in at least one national trucking magazine!
It’s all made possible by the brain power available in Geiger’s research team and by the power of high technology put to work in service of his research. It takes a lot of modern technology and heavy-duty computing power to help Geiger and his coresearchers make sense of the most complex organism out there: the human brain.
Finding out how it all works, how one cell in the brain communicates with millions of others, how neurochemicals—the brain’s messengers—work, and how and why things malfunction to cause problems such as epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, and drug addiction, is Geiger’s and his team’s main mission. He strives for excellence in this regard and aims to promote UND as a national leader in brain research.
The technology serving this “final frontier” research into brain behavior is sometimes truly astonishing. It includes a federal award of $3.8 million for a microPET (positron emission tomography) scanner and a cyclotron, used in the study of the brain at the cellular and molecular levels. The extremely sophisticated PET scanner allows biomedical researchers to investigate neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s as well as brain mechanisms underlying drug addiction.
