er's disease research joined the faculty this fall.
Dr. Ben A. Bahr accepted the William C. Friday Distin-
guished Professorship in Molecular Biology and Biochem-
istry. He is a tenured member of the Biology Department
with laboratories and offices in UNCP's Biotechnology
Research and Training Center at COMtech.
In addition to other sources, a $200,000 grant from the
North Carolina Biotechnology Center (NCBC) helps fund
his lab and purchase materials and supplies for research on
neurodegenerative disorders. The NCBC's Oliver Smithies
Faculty Recruitment Grant Program aids in the recruitment
of top science talent to North Carolina.
Besides research into Alzheimer's
and other neurological disorders, Dr.
Bahr has a history of attracting grants,
collaborating with the international
scientific community, training student-
researchers and entrepreneurship.
Dr. Bahr discovered a new class of
drug that reduces Alzheimer-type pro-
tein accumulation. He has worked with
several pharmaceutical companies and
co-founded Synaptic Dynamics, Inc.,
a company that is developing novel
drugs for Alzheimer's disease and other
protein accumulation disorders, such as
Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases.
Dr. Bahr described the discovery,
which came early in his career.
"I was playing with brain tissue
to determine how it was com-
promised by aging events and
discovered that a small ma-
nipulation can trigger clearance
mechanisms to work harder,"
Dr. Bahr said. "The brain is vast,
just like the universe, and there
are probably infinite possibilities
regarding how it encodes memory, which we are merely
scratching the surface in our understanding, but there are
also countless ways the memory systems can be disrupted
by disease.
"Alzheimer's is a tragic disease, but once early diagnosis
is made, new strategies should be able to slow it down and
make it more manageable," he said.
His research on other neurodegenerative diseases has
led to projects to develop protection avenues against a
wide range of brain damage from trauma to stroke.
the University of Connecticut, Dr. Bahr is the first person to
serve as the Friday Distinguished Professor, named in honor
of the retired UNC president, and to occupy the new Friday
Chair Research Laboratory.
UNCP is fortunate to attract an outstanding scientist of
Dr. Bahr's caliber, said Dr. Martin Slann, dean of the Col-
lege of Arts and Sciences.
"He arrived at UNCP with important and potentially
life-saving research projects already funded and well un-
derway," Dean Slann said. "The search committee members
did their work well and selected an individual who is at the
"We all have every confidence
that Ben Bahr will continue to
build and augment an internation-
al reputation that can only bring
great benefit to this institution," he
said.
Dr. Bahr's resume is distin-
guished and well-rounded.
He earned two Bachelor of
Arts degrees in molecular biology
and biochemistry and a Ph.D. in
chemistry from the University of
California, Santa Barbara. He was
most recently on the faculty of the
University of Connecticut's Phar-
maceutical Sciences and
Physiology and Neurobiology
departments.
pending, and he has licensed dif-
ferent inventions from his work
to pharmaceutical companies.
Besides founding his own
company, Dr. Bahr served as
consultant and/or collaborator
for several pharmaceutical com-
cals, Cortex, and MAK Scientific.
An editorial board member for five academic journals
since 2004, he has won several awards including the
Young Investigator Award from the International Society for
Neurochemistry and from the University of California at
Irvine, where he taught for seven years in the Center for the
Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.