Below is an excerpt featuring Stowers Scientific Director Kausik Si, Ph.D., who was recently named to In Kansas City Magazine's 2024 list of Innovators and Influencers in Kansas City. Read the full article and learn more about the other honorees here. 

Healthcare: Kausik Si, Stowers Institute for Medical Research
By: Katie Van Luchene

Our first kiss. A favorite aunt’s perfume. The smell of a campground fire. Memories—good or bad—define us, are “part of who we are as humans,” according to neurologist Kausik Si. And apart from triggering an emotion, memories can mean life or death.

Take the simple fruit fly, one of the tiny beings the scientist is studying as a means to help treat brain diseases, including Alzheimer’s. “Fruit flies must remember where the food is, who to mate with, who to avoid. Consciousness, the relationship between prey and predator, which is part of every living thing, is what intrigues me the most. A fruit fly may seem so far from us, yet you can get deep inside to see how memories work.”

Of the two parts of any disease—the cause and the cure—Si’s work tackles the cause. In the case of Alzheimer’s, there have been multiple studies on proteins that clump, called amyloids. Si’s groundbreaking study, called “Tuning memory by altering amyloids,” asks what if this clumping isn’t always a bad thing?

Perhaps, he surmised, if instead of removing all the clumps, we can remove just the bad ones and keep the good ones.

He and a scientist partner earned an award from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which was founded in 2015 by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.