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Miranda E. Orr, PhD (she/her/hers)

Associate Professor
Wake Forest University School of Medicine
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, United States

Dr. Miranda Orr is an Associate Professor of Internal Medicine in Geriatrics and Gerontology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, also serving as a Research Health Scientist at the W.G. (Bill) Hefner VA Medical Center in Salisbury, NC. She earned a PhD in Neuroscience from Montana State University, specializing in mechanisms of tau pathogenesis using Alzheimer's disease stem cell and mouse models. As a Claude D. Pepper Center scholar at the Sam and Ann Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies in San Antonio, TX, she received postdoctoral training in the biology of aging and translational geroscience. Her research focuses on tau neurobiology and its role as a cellular stress response at the intersection between healthy brain aging and neurodegeneration. She made significant advancements in aging research and education, earning the prestigious Wake Forest School of Medicine Jarrahi Geroscience Scholar title in 2022. Her translational neurobiology program encompasses discovery science in cell and rodent models, neuropathological and spatial proteogenomic profiling of postmortem human brains, and early-stage clinical trials. Using this approach her laboratory discovered a link between intraneuronal tau accumulation, a defining neuropathology in Alzheimer’s disease, and cellular senescence, a hallmark of aging. This seminal study established senescent cells as a therapeutic target for neurodegenerative diseases and helped ignite a new field of study. She has translated this finding to clinical testing where she is leading a multisite Phase II trial targeting senescent cell clearance in older adults with mild cognitive impairment or early Alzheimer’s disease. For this work, she received the 2022 Melvin R. Goodes Prize for Excellence in Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery from the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation and was featured in the January 2023 issue of National Geographic for identifying and imaging senescent cells in Alzheimer’s disease.

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