“I recently exhaled a breath I’ve been holding in for nearly half my life. After applying over a decade ago, I’m finally an American. This means so many things to me. Foremost, it means I can go back to the the Middle East, and see my mama and the family, for the first time in 14 years.” The words appear on a social media post next to a photo of Ubadah Sabbagh, a postdoc at MIT's McGovern Institute, who in 2021 joined the lab of Guoping Feng, the James W. (1963) and Patricia T. Poitras Professor at MIT. Sabbagh’s journey from Syria to his research position has been marked by determination and courage, a multifaceted curiosity, and a role as a scientist-writer/scientist-advocate. He is particularly committed to the importance of humanity in science.

In hopes of discovering new targets for potential Alzheimer’s treatments, MIT researchers have performed the broadest analysis yet of the genomic, epigenomic, and transcriptomic changes that occur in every cell type in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Using more than 2 million cells from more than 400 postmortem brain samples, the researchers analyzed how gene expression is disrupted as Alzheimer’s progresses. They also tracked changes in cells’ epigenomic modifications, which help to determine which genes are turned on or off in a particular cell. Together, these approaches offer the most detailed picture yet of the genetic and molecular underpinnings of Alzheimer’s. The researchers report their findings in a set of four papers appearing today in Cell. The studies were led by BCS proefssor Li-Huei Tsai, director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences faculty members Ev Fedorenko, Ted Gibson, and Roger Levy believe they can answer a fundamental question: What is the purpose of language?