Luis Prieto, Ph.D.

Dr. Luis Prieto is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He received his bachelor’s degree in Cellular and Molecular Biochemistry from The University of Texas at El Paso and his Ph.D. from the Mayo Clinic Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.

Dr. Prieto’s primary goal is to establish himself as an independent researcher, and he is committed to enhance diversity among future leaders in science. He is dedicated to build an inclusive lab environment that ignites confidence in underrepresented students. His research focuses on elucidating the mechanisms of aging predisposing to age-related conditions, including neurodegeneration in particular Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The overall goal of Dr. Prieto’s research is to advance the field of prevention and early detection in AD and develop tools that can help us identify predictive biomarkers beyond genetics that inform treatment decision-making to prevent, postpone, or suppress AD pathology.

As a CLEAR-AD Diversity Scholar, Dr. Prieto is working with models of neurodegeneration to explore their similarities with healthy aging and other age-related conditions. The objective is to uncover the impact of cellular senescence markers in vivo to assess disease causation and simultaneously identify novel AD targets. Additionally, he plans to utilize the CLEAR-AD identified centrally linked longitudinal peripheral biomarkers of AD from different brain regions and match blood samples from different background patient cohorts to test and validate the prioritized biomarkers of AD in preclinical in vivo models.