Jessica Young earned a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology under the mentorship of Dr. Albert La Spada at the University of Washington in 2009. She then pursued postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Lawrence S.B. Goldstein at the University of California San Diego. During her Ph.D. and Postdoctoral training, she gained a deep understanding of the cellular biology of neurodegeneration, especially protein trafficking and quality control systems in neurons that become dysfunctional in disease. Importantly, her training provided expertise in cell culture and human-induced pluripotent stem cell models. She returned to the University of Washington in 2016 to begin her own independent laboratory focusing on genetic risk in endo-lysosomal genes and their contribution to early cellular phenotypes relevant to AD. The Young lab has made important contributions to the field, such as elucidating the mechanisms of the AD risk gene SORL1, an endosomal sorting receptor (Young et al., 2015; Knupp et al., 2022; Mishra et al., 2022; Mishra et al., 2023) and developing hiPSC lines from autopsy-confirmed AD cases with matched brain tissue (Rose et al., 2018). The project for the Cure Alzheimer’s fund will leverage this expertise to elucidate new therapeutic targets for AD.