Dr. Bjugstad received her M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of South Florida in the Department of Psychology. She has worked on several rodent models of neurodegeneration, including AIDS dementia, aging, and Parkinson's disease. After graduation, Dr. Bjugstad joined the lab of Curt Freed as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. Here, she analyzed the long-term follow-up data from Dr. Freed's double-blind, placebo-controlled fetal tissue transplants in Parkinson's disease patients. It was during this time that Drs. Bjugstad and Freed discovered several patients had developed dyskinesias several years after their neural tissue transplants despite significant improvement initially. As a result of this Dr. Bjugstad became specifically interested in improving neural tissue transplant results by attempting to recreate the nigrostriatal pathway. Currently, Dr. Bjugstad is an Instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at the same univerisity, collaborating with Dr. John Sladek in developing the primate model of Parkinson's disease. In conjunction with partners at Yale, Harvard, and the Burnham Institute, Drs. Bjugstad and Sladek are evaluating the potential of neural stem cells to protect and replace lost neurons in the parkinsonian primate. It is Dr. Bjugstad's hope that the result of her work funded by the MJFF will lead to improved transplant functioning in Parkinson's disease patients.