Posted on September 17, 2026 in ASRC News, Neuroscience Initiative
The award supports her lab’s work to investigate why specific brain cells become more vulnerable with age.
As the population of older adults grows, scientists are working to better understand how the brain changes across the lifespan and why some neural systems are more vulnerable than others. Susana Mingote, a professor with the CUNY ASRC’s Neuroscience Initiative and CUNY Graduate Center’s Biology, Neuroscience, and Cognitive Neuroscience programs, is taking on that challenge with the support of a new five-year, $2.9 million R01 grant from the NIH’s National Institute on Aging.
The project, “Pathway-Specific Vulnerability of Dopamine-Glutamate Neurons in Aging and Memory,” will investigate why some of the brain’s dopamine-producing cells deteriorate with age and how that decline may contribute to changes in memory and motivation. Funding from the grant will enable Mingote’s lab to support the work of a research scientist, data scientist, postdoctoral researcher, and two Ph.D. students.
“Our goal is to understand the changes that happen in the brain as we age so that we can find ways to preserve cognitive health for as long as possible,” Mingote said. “This is especially important as more people are living longer and want to remain independent in their communities. Identifying where and how the brain is most vulnerable to aging is an important step toward helping people age in place while maintaining memory, motivation, and quality of life.”
Dopamine is a chemical messenger that plays important roles in learning, memory, and motivation. While the brain’s dopamine system generally becomes less effective with age, Mingote’s research has identified a particular group of dopamine neurons that also release the neurotransmitter glutamate and appear to be especially vulnerable. Her lab will compare young and aged mice at multiple levels, from individual cells and synapses to larger neural circuits and behavior. The team will examine how connections between dopamine neurons and brain regions involved in memory and motivation change with age. In collaboration with Ye He, co-director of the ASRC’s MALDI Imaging Core Lab, the researchers will also map dopamine concentrations across the whole brain in young, middle-aged, and aged mice to obtain a detailed picture of when early deficits emerge and which dopamine circuits are most sensitive to aging.
“Together, these studies will help us determine which dopamine pathways are most vulnerable to aging and when those changes occur,” Mingote said. “Our hypothesis is that connections to memory-related regions are affected earlier, while connections to regions involved in motivation become impaired later in life.”
Mingote’s team will also measure whether restoring affected dopamine circuits can improve cognitive performance in mouse models. The project could ultimately provide a clearer picture of how aging affects specific dopamine pathways and point toward new strategies for supporting healthy cognitive aging.