The Principal Investigator

Research Mission

From the age of 16, Dr. Cowell developed an interest in studying the brain. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (1993-1997), she explored her research interests in the laboratories of Dr. David Irwin (visual processing and saccades) and Dr. William Greenough (experience-induced synaptic plasticity), where she discovered her love for neuroanatomy and circuitry. She continued her education as a Ph.D. student in the Neuroscience Program at the University of Michigan (1997-2002), where she explored the contributions of inflammation to acute brain injury in the neonatal rat. During her Ph.D. work, she developed a strong conceptual model for mechanisms of neuronal cell death and neuroinflammation, became interested in understanding transcriptional programs for cellular identity and stress responses, and developed a strong technical skillset, including confocal microscopy, a technique she still practices on a regular basis. All staff and trainees in the Cowell laboratory utilize confocal microscopy at some point in their training to resolve transcript and protein expression in a cell type-specific manner.

After completing her Ph.D., she completed her postdoctoral training in the lab of Dr. James Russell at the VA Hospital at the University of Michigan (2002-2006). Here, she began work with the transcriptional coactivator peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma coactivator 1á (PGC-1á), which had been recently discovered by the Spiegelman group at Harvard. The premise for exploring the biology of PGC-1á was very compelling, considering evidence for its ability to control transcriptional programs for mitochondrial biogenesis and (potentially) neuroprotection. Based on initial studies with PGC-1á, Dr. Cowell garnered a postdoctoral fellowship from NINDS exploring its role in dorsal root ganglia neuron responses in models of diabetic neuropathy.

Based on her graduate and postdoctoral work and interest in PGC-1á involvement in psychiatric and neurological disorders, she was recruited to the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Neurobiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2006. She established a lab to determine the roles for PGC-1á in the brain and determined that neurons with high mitochondrial density, such as parvalbumin-expressing interneurons and Purkinje cells, have the highest expression, and that PGC-1á is required for normal function of these cells. Other work focused on the roles for PGC-1á in gene regulation in cell types vulnerable to dysfunction in Huntington Disease and schizophrenia.

In light of this work and upon receipt of several grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson Research, Dr. Cowell was recruited to Southern Research, a drug discovery and drug development non-profit organization in Birmingham, Alabama. There, she served as the Chair of Neuroscience from 2017-2022. During that time, she consulted for internal and external neurodegeneration-focused drug discovery projects and facilitated interactions among Southern Research staff and UAB faculty. Her lab’s work led to the determination that members of the Estrogen-related Receptor (ERR) family are likely drivers of PGC-1á-mediated gene regulation in neurons. She expanded her lab’s work to explore transcriptional and functional changes in the cortex of mouse models of frontotemporal dementia.

In 2022, Dr. Cowell was recruited back to UAB as a Tenured Professor of Neurology to run her lab and serve as the Associate Director for Training in the Center for Neurodegeneration and Experimental Therapeutics. In that role, she continues to explore the transcriptional contributors to neuronal vulnerability in movement disorders, while directing the Training Program in Neurodegeneration with Dr. Erik Roberson. 

Even with her lifelong love for science, Dr. Cowell’s personal priority has been raising her two children, Noah and Ellie. In her free time, she enjoys acting in community theater productions, singing in the church choir, and walking her rescue pup Susie.

Training Mission

Throughout her career, she has been extensively involved in undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate training. She served as Co-Director of the Neuroscience Theme of the Graduate Biomedical Sciences Program, for which she trained and lectured students in the areas of developmental neurobiology, neurodegeneration, and presentation skills at UAB. In total, she has trained over fifty undergraduate students (twenty of whom completed senior thesis documents), eight graduate students (4 in the past 10 years), and one postdoctoral fellow, and she has served as a thesis committee member for thirty-six additional Ph.D. students (Chair of eight committees). One of her recently graduated Ph.D. students was awarded the Transition to Aging F99-K00 award (F99 AG068428). In her current role as the Associate Director for Training in the Center for Neurodegeneration and Experimental Therapeutics at UAB and Associate Director for the Training Program in Neurodegeneration (5T32 NS095775), she is charged with enhancing the training experiences of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and undergraduate students in neurodegeneration by providing career development opportunities and building a structure for inter-lab and interdepartmental collaborations and activities.   

Drug Development in Neurodegeneration

In my role as Chair of Neuroscience at Southern Research (2017-2022), Dr. Cowell coordinated neuroscience drug discovery efforts and facilitated interactions with faculty at Southern Research and UAB and with other external clients. Southern Research is a not-for-profit research institute that utilizes its extensive chemistry expertise and unique small molecule libraries to identify novel drug targets and small molecules for the treatment of cancer, infectious disease, and neurodegeneration. During this time, she served as the main neurobiology consultant for the Step Up for Substance Use Disorder (SUD) Program funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (75N95020Q00024). In that role, she provided advice on experimental design regarding target validation, engagement, and liabilities for over 25 different projects involving a variety of different drug discovery modalities, including small molecule, peptide, nanoparticle, and microRNA-based approaches. As part of her recruitment back to UAB in 2022, she was charged with assisting the neuroscience community with re-envisioning their ongoing projects to incorporate strategies for target identification, prioritization, and validation, with the goal of identifying good candidates for moving into a neurodegeneration drug discovery pipeline with Southern Research.