Integrative Neuroscience; Ion Channels, Transporters and Neurotransmitter Receptors; Neural Development and Plasticity; Neurological Disorders; and Synapses and Circuits
Dr. Role obtained an A.B. in applied mathematics from Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass) and a Ph.D. in physiology from Harvard Medical School (Boston). She did her postdoctoral training in pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and at Washington University School of Medicine (St. Louis, Mo) with Gerald Fischbach, who later served as the director of NINDS (1998–2001).
After post-doctoral training, Dr Role was recruited to Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1985 as an assistant professor, rising to the rank of associate (1991) and then full professor (1995) before serving as Chair of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at SUNY Stony Brook in 2008. Dr. Role also served as co-director of SBUs School of Medicine Neurosciences Institute with the chairs of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. She has been honored as an elected Fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology in 2009 and elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011
Dr Role has been the principal investigator on numerous NIH-funded grant awards, with continuous research support from 1982-2019 (when she came to the NIH) as well as being named as an early recipient of an NINDS Javits award. She has also received 3 separate awards from the McKnight Foundation at different stages of her career and was twice named a Distinguished Investigator by the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, now the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. In 2010, she received the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, which “supports scientists with outstanding records of creativity pursuing new research directions to develop pioneering approaches to major challenges in biomedical and behavioral research.” Dr Role has published more than 100 scientific articles and proudly mentored ~20 undergraduate students and more than 60 post-doctoral fellows, graduate, and medical students during her years at both Columbia P&S and SUNY Stony Brook. Dr. Role joined the NINDS as a Senior Investigator in 2019 and served as the NINDS Scientific Director from Jan. 2019 to May 2021. She was thrilled to be able to return to full-time laboratory work in 2021, where she continues to enjoy the mentoring of, and being mentored by, fellow scientists.
Research Interests
Dr. Role’s research focuses on the brain’s cholinergic system over the lifespan. Detecting saliency facilitates learning and survival by enabling organisms to focus their perceptual and cognitive resources on the most pertinent subset of available sensory data. Cholinergic signaling—which is essential for selective attention, cognitive processing, and memory - can be compromised during aging with wide ranging effects from sleep interference, diminished cognitive flexibility to increased fearfulness. The laboratories research has focused primarily on physiological approaches to cholinergic circuits and neural-systems analysis in genetically modified mice. More recent work also includes human and non-human primate studies of cognitive resilience vs vulnerability with aging.