Janine Kwapis Honored for Innovative Cognitive Aging Research

Janine Kwapis, the Paul Berg Early Career Professor in the Biological Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, has been received the 2024 McKnight Brain Research Foundation Innovator Award in Cognitive Aging and Memory Loss from the American Federation for Aging Research and the McKnight Brain Research Foundation.

The prize will provide Dr. Kwapis with a three year, $750,000 grant to support her project, “Improving cognitive flexibility in old age by fixing the transcriptome within memory cells.”

At Penn State, Dr. Kwapis holds affiliations with the department of biology and the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences. In addition to teaching, she also serves as director of the Center for Molecular Investigation of Neurological Disorders. Prior to joining the Penn State faculty in 2018, she spent four years as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Irvine.

Currently, Dr. Kwapis studies the molecular and epigenetic mechanisms that support long-term memory formation, storage, and updating. Through her research, she aims to increase our understanding of the molecular basis of memory formation and determine how these mechanisms are dysregulated during aging, leading to age-related memory impairments.

Dr. Kwapis is a graduate of Alma College in Michigan, where she majored in psychology. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscience from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.