Heather Rice, PhD

Biography

Dr. Rice has nearly fifteen years of experience studying the biology of the Amyloid Precursor Protein, which has an established role in the etiology of Alzheimer’s disease. Born and raised in Watonga, Oklahoma, she graduated with a BS in Zoology-Biomedical Sciences from the University of Oklahoma. She then completed a PhD in Neurobiology at Harvard University in the laboratory of Dr. Dennis Selkoe at the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases. During her doctoral research, she investigated the function of the Amyloid Precursor Protein in the development of the cortex and examined the role of potential interactors in regulating its proteolytic processing. As a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratories of Dr. Bart De Strooper and Dr. Joris de Wit at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain and Disease Research in Leuven, Belgium, she discovered that the shed extracellular domain of the Amyloid Precursor Protein functions as a ligand for the GABA type B Receptor to regulate synaptic activity in neurons, a finding that was published in Science in 2019. She returned to Oklahoma in 2019 to establish her independent laboratory, which implements a broad range of approaches including protein-protein interactions, cellular physiology, and animal modeling to further elucidate the function of the Amyloid Precursor Protein across multiple cell types in the brain and determine the consequences of that signaling on disease pathways. The laboratory aims to leverage these functions of the Amyloid Precursor Protein to alleviate chronic neuroinflammation, neuronal hyperexcitability, and memory loss in Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Rice has received both national and international recognition including being awarded a 2007 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, 2011 Alzheimer’s Association Travel Grant, 2016 Alzheimer’s Association Research Fellowship, and 2019 Junior Faculty Award from the 14th International Conference on Alzheimer’s & Parkinson’s Diseases. She was elected chair of the student/postdoc seminar at the 2018 Gordon Research International Conference on Neurobiology of Brain Disorders. She is currently a Promising Junior Investigator (PJI) on the Geroscience Center of Biological Research Excellence (CoBRE) and serves as a Co-Leader of Basic Science Research at the Oklahoma Center for Geroscience and Healthy Brain Aging.

Email

heather-rice@ouhsc.edu

Publications

Research Interests:

• Alzheimer’s Disease
• Synaptic Function
• Neuroinflammation
• Amyloid Precursor Protein
• GABA Receptors