Assistant Director, Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease Prevention
Penny Dacks, PhD is the Assistant Director for Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease Prevention at the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation. The mission of this program, started in March of 2012, is to provide a credible scientific voice to the lay, medical, and scientific communities in the evaluation and assessment of potential therapies to prevent and delay cognitive aging and Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Dacks trained as a postdoctoral fellow in Neuroscience with Charles Mobbs at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, earned her PhD in Neuroscience with Naomi Rance at the University of Arizona, and trained at the Molecular Biology of Aging course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. Her research in academia examined models of menopause, metabolic syndrome, and anorexia nervosa to understand how the brain regulates energy balance in response to peripheral signals in the blood including estrogens, sugars, and fatty acids. Dr. Dacks has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and her research was funded by postdoctoral and predoctoral fellowships from sources including a National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Aging, the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Arizona, and two non-profit foundations. Dr. Dacks is a member of the Society for Neuroscience, the Endocrine Society, and the Association for Women in Science. She earned her BSc Honours degree in Life Sciences from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada.
Contact: 212-901-8005
Email: pdacks@alzdiscovery.org