Jean-Pierre Roussarie joined Boston University School of Medicine in September 2021. The Roussarie lab is interested in deciphering the molecular events leading to neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Roussarie holds an engineering degree from the French Ecole Polytechnique, as well as a Ph.D. in neurovirology from the Pasteur Institute in Paris. During his Ph.D., mentored by Dr. Michel Brahic, he studied the trafficking within the spinal cord of Theiler’s virus, a virus that causes a disease similar to multiple sclerosis in the mouse. Dr. Roussarie identified an original mechanism by which the virus can infect myelin-forming cells from an underlying axon. When he moved to the Rockefeller University, to the laboratory of the late Nobel Prize laureate, Dr. Paul Greengard, he started to study the neurons of the brain most vulnerable to neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease. He was tasked by Dr. Greengard to understand why these neurons die very early on during the course of the disease when many others remain intact until the late stages of the disease. As a Senior Research Associate, Dr. Roussarie used, with his team, cutting-edge functional genomics methods in mouse models and human cells in order to find genes and pathways responsible for disease vulnerability. He wants to understand how AD predisposition factors and how surrounding glial cells modulate neuronal vulnerability and identify a novel generation of therapeutic targets.