Lenora Higginbotham, MD

Dr. Higginbotham’s research aims to advance reliable biomarkers for enhanced diagnostic classification, disease monitoring, and confirming therapeutic target engagement. She was first introduced to proteomic analysis and its role in neurodegenerative disease during medical school, where she spent 6 months in the Emory Center of Neurodegenerative Disease (CND) learning the fundamentals of sample preparation and mass spectrometry (MS) while analyzing brain-derived proteomic signatures in preclinical Alzheimer’s disease (AD). That project resulted in a first author publication in the journal Proteomes and instilled in her a deep understanding of the complex pathophysiology of neurodegeneration. Toward the end of her movement disorders fellowship, she returned to the Emory CND to further apply her proteomic background to both AD and parkinsonian disorders. Since then, she have been part of a highly collaborative effort, led by long-time mentors Allan Levey and Nicholas Seyfried, to develop a systems-oriented MS pipeline for biomarker development across neurodegenerative diseases.