Johns Hopkins University Professor Peter Searson

will speak on The blood-brain barrier: what is it and what does it do? The blood-brain barrier is a 600 km network of blood vessels that supplies fuel to the brain while at the same time providing protection from anything in circulation that could compromise normal brain function. We start by describing how the blood-brain barrier performs these functions. We then discuss the role of the blood-brain barrier in health and disease. Finally, we describe how tissue-engineering can be used create models of the blood-brain barrier and how these models can be used to contribute to understanding disease progression and developing strategies for rejuvenation and repair.

Searson received his PhD from the University of Manchester in England in 1982 and was a post-doctoral associate in Ron Latanision’s lab at MIT. Since 1990 he has been at Johns Hopkins University. He was co-founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Nanobiotechnology from 2006 to 2016, and holds appointments in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the Department of Biomedical Engineering, the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and the Department of Oncology. He is the Joseph R. and Lynne C. Reynolds Professor of Engineering at Hopkins.