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.