Wilma Wasco, Ph.D.

Associate Investigator, Neurology, Mass General Research Institute; Associate Professor of Neurology; Harvard Medical School; Research Staff, Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital


Dr. Wasco received her PhD from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and carried out her postdoctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Dr. Wasco was part of an international collaborative effort that identified the familial Alzheimer’s disease associated presenilin 1 (PS1) and presenilin 2 (PS2) genes. In addition, her laboratory identified genes that encode the two amyloid precursor-like proteins (APLP1 and APLP2) and calsenilin, a calcium binding protein that interacts with the presenilin proteins. Her research has been focused on understanding the biological role that each of these AD-linked proteins plays in the normal, aging and diseased brain. Dr. Wasco is a member of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit and The MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease and she is a Pew Biomedical Scholar.

Funded Research

These projects were made possible from Cure Alzheimer's Fund support.

Selected Publications

These published papers resulted from Cure Alzheimer’s Fund support.

Li, A., Ahsen, O. O., Liu, J. J., Du, C., McKee, M. L., Yang, Y., Wasco, W., Newton-Cheh, C. H., O'Donnell, C. J., Fujimoto, J. G., Zhou, C., & Tanzi, R. E. Silencing of the Drosophila ortholog of SOX5 in heart leads to cardiac dysfunction as detected by optical coherence tomography, Human Molecular Genetics, May 21, 2013, Read More

Suh, J., Romano, D. M., Nitschke, L., Herrick, S. P., DiMarzio, B. A., Dzhala, V., Bae, J. S., Oram, M. K., Zheng, Y., Hooli, B., Mullin, K., Gennarino, V. A., Wasco, W., Schmahmann, J. D., Albers, M. W., Zoghbi, H. Y., & Tanzi, R. E. Loss of Ataxin-1 Potentiates Alzheimer’s Pathogenesis by Elevating Cerebral BACE1 Transcription, Cell, August 22, 2019, Read More