By Michelle Jaffee; photos by Jackie Hart
Kimberly Alonge, Ph.D., is an associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Florida’s College of Medicine. Her research explores the role of the brain’s extracellular matrices, or the supportive network surrounding brain cells, in neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders as well as in aging, obesity and diabetes.
Q: What is the most exciting discovery you’ve made so far?
A. My most exciting discovery so far happened during my postdoc and continues to build my career: new understanding of the brain’s extracellular space. In the brain, you have neurons, you have glial cells, and they’re sitting in something. Originally considered ‘packing material,’ the brain’s extracellular space has since been shown to provide both physical structure and signaling regulation. This part of the nervous system has largely been ignored. My postdoc developed technologies that made it possible to start studying this extracellular space at a quantitative level that allowed us to make very fundamental biological discoveries about its involvement in neuron health, neuron signaling, neural regeneration and traumatic injuries. So my largest discovery would be method development to study this extracellular space, and then coming from that, all the functional and biological implications of how extracellular spaces influence the neurons they enmesh.
Q: What inspired you to focus on this area of neuroscience?
A. I grew up in the Baltimore suburbs and went to Salisbury University as a business major. On my first day, I walked into the wrong classroom, and I know it sounds like a comedy movie but it’s a true story: If you look at my transcript, I started as a business major and one day later changed to biology. Biology suddenly opened my eyes, and it seemed like a positive environment to explore life in general. That professor changed everything for me. He said life is not fixed, and it’s our job to explore it and understand it further. And it’s okay that we don’t know everything because it’s up to us to study it and find out more. I thought, I want to live my life like that. It was like freedom.
During my rotations at Salisbury, I realized I wanted to pivot my career and move away from something I had come to know very well, which was bacteria, and move into something I didn’t know well, and that was eukaryotic cells. And so for my Ph.D. at West Virginia University, I joined a biochemistry lab that had to do with metabolism and weight loss by manipulating the peripheral organs to express certain proteins that allow you to lose weight and control your blood glucose and sugar. I realized that while we were manipulating these peripheral organs to fix metabolic syndrome, a key missing piece of my research was the brain and how was the brain overriding the systems of the peripheral organs. And so I said, once I’m done here, I want to go to the final frontier, which is the brain. From there, I headed to the University of Washington for a postdoc under Dr. Michael Schwartz in studying brain control of peripheral metabolism, including energy homeostasis through changes in their hypothalamic extracellular spaces.
Q: How do you envision your research advancing neurological disease treatments?
A. I hope my research is applicable across a broad range of conditions, from Alzheimer’s to neurodevelopmental disorders. And that’s because these extracellular matrices form around many types of neurons throughout the brain. Each of these different populations of neurons has a very specific function. If I can figure out a method to stabilize or regrow them, or to allow them to continue amplifying a signal, that method could be applied throughout the brain to unique neural populations involved in specific neurological diseases. We know that these extracellular matrices are lost in Alzheimer’s. And so if we can grow them back, we are reversing a defect that influences signaling. Natural aging will also have a long-term effect on your brain’s ability to form those protective coats. Another example is in pregnancy: What happens if the mother experiences an insult that distorts the formation of the offspring’s extracellular matrices? One may expect that aberrant changes in the ‘packing material’ of the growing brain will directly influence how the offspring’s brain develops. Eventually, if we can establish a mechanistic path from a specific insult at a specific gestational stage, we can understand how it will manifest as a neurological disorder in the offspring, and then we can say, OK, here’s our target. Let’s start looking for different drugs that could counteract that insult to reverse its effects before the disease develops.
Q: What makes working in your lab different from other research environments?
A. There’s nothing I’d assign a student that I wouldn’t do myself, and that’s a motto I often use in the lab. My lab is in growth mode, having joined the UF faculty five months ago. Currently we have two undergrads, one grad student and one postdoc. My teaching and communication style is very hands-on; I like to perform studies side-by-side with my students. Because I’m at the bench and in the surgery rooms, I’m immediately available to help troubleshoot and answer questions. A lot of deep-theory talks also happen in the lab, where we’ll discuss new findings on the spot while we work on studies together.
Q: What do you enjoy doing outside of work? A. I love working out. I’ve run 15 to 20 half-marathons and two full marathons. It pushes you to the absolute extreme, mentally and physically, and I love pushing myself career-wise and in my personal life. Outside of running, I love the gym in general and have thought of many good ideas for grants on the stair climber. And true story: I chose my home because it’s within running distance of the gyms I go to!
