Neuroscientist Researches Lifestyle to Maintain Brain

Henriette van Praag, Ph.D., was a teenager in the Netherlands when a scientist’s advocacy for treating patients with mood disorders with medication in addition to psychotherapeutic approaches made headlines. “The concept that there is a biological basis for behavior was very controversial at the time,” van Praag says.

A few years later as a psychology student, van Praag’s interest in the subject elevated and she began graduate work at Tel-Aviv University in Israel, where she worked on opiates and the development of pain perception.

At Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey, postdoctoral research on nerve growth factors led to an interest in brain plasticity. Later, as a staff scientist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, she discovered that voluntary running wheel exercise in rodents increases the number of new neurons in the hippocampus, a brain area important for learning and memory. Her expertise landed her a role as an investigator at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, Maryland. She recently joined FAU as associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Science in the Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine, and the FAU Brain Institute.

“Dr. van Praag’s research adds significant depth to our neuroscience research community, specifically in areas related to brain plasticity and mechanisms by which the circuitry of the brain can be shaped by experience,” said Randy D. Blakely, Ph.D., professor, College of Medicine and executive director of the FAU Brain Institute. “Her work reveals an unexpected dynamism of neural structures that ultimately drives our capacity to learn and enjoy the world around us.”

van Praag says she’s excited to join the institute to continue research in behavioral interventions, such as the profound effects diet and exercise have on brain plasticity, suggesting lifestyle intervention help enhance or maintain the brain.

She also credits the university’s focus on healthy aging for drawing her here. And, she adds with a chuckle, “the nice local environment and weather."