The Health, Brain and Cognition Lab congratulates three-and-one-half-year team member, Dr. Marco Pipoly, who in late May successfully defended his thesis. Dr. Pipoly is currently preparing for his next career step as a post-doctoral scholar with Dr. Gagan Wig at the University of Texas – Dallas. There, he will continue research on how we keep our brain functioning despite the emergence of age-related brain pathology.
Marco has been “a constant source of energy and passion for science in the lab, a mentor and friend to so many,” says HBC Lab Director Dr. Michelle Voss, who has served as Marco’s co-mentor, along with Action, Control & Learning Lab Director Dr. Eliot Hazeltine.
Marco joined the University of Iowa Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Neuroscience in 2018, after earning his Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, summa cum-laude, at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Marco credits the Washington University ENDURE undergraduate research program in neuroscience as the catalyst behind his pursuit of an academic career. Upon entering Iowa, Dr. Pipoly spent his first two years rotating to find the right fit in a research lab, ultimately switching into the Voss and Hazeltine labs in January 2021.
A co-mentorship under the eye of Drs. Voss and Hazeltine was ideal for Marco to develop his skills in cognitive science to study how decline in brain function impacts cognition. “Michelle is a brain health person whose work focuses more on understanding the consequence of health on cognition, while Eliot’s expertise is more zoomed in as he focuses on how to disentangle the different processes of the brain the support cognition. Because they had overlapping projects, it made sense that a co-mentorship could work.” Co-mentorships are ideal to achieve this goal and are not uncommon in PhD programs, says Marco.
Marco knew that he wanted to develop expertise in cognitive and brain science, but he did not anticipate falling in love with the field of aging research. “I came into this work really interested in cognition, attention, and executive function and got excited by the idea that not everyone is going to experience the same effects of aging because of the resilience factors they might build up in life,” he says. “I was new to aging, never worked with that population before. I fell in love and quickly started work that I will probably do the rest of my career.”
Serendipitously, Marco’s newfound love of aging research coincided with a need to address the needs of his aging mother. By the time Marco transitioned into the lab, he had recently moved his mother from South America into a care facility in the Iowa City area. The experience, though challenging, further fueled his passion for aging research. “I discovered she had dementia. I had to help her secure housing, address financial issues, close out her financial situation in Colombia, secure power of attorney, and set up medical care, so she could start living as independently as she can considering her cognitive state,” he says.
In his travels around the country, Marco has met older adults with a wide range of abilities, from those suffering with dementia to a 98-year-old who does CrossFit and a 95-year-old learning a new language. “For some of them, the things in life they experienced seemed to set them apart and afford them some continued independence and cognitive vitality,” he says. “ Not everything works as well as it used to, but their minds do. They can make choices for themselves and experience the freedom to pursue their passions in retirement.”
“At the time that I joined the lab, I hadn’t quite connected that there was an area of research in aging that had a theory about why some older adults cognitive age better than others,” Marco says. When he learned about the theory of cognitive reserve, an explanation of how brain function and cognitive health can continue despite the brain’s breakdown with age, he realized, “That’s what I wanted to work on.” He wants to understand how parts of the brain can look bad in electronic scans but still function well enough to continue completing tasks of daily living. “You can have these ‘skeleton’ brains that function as well as big, young thick brains such that cognitive function presents similarly.”
One avenue of research at the Voss and Hazeltine labs was a study that focused on whether differences in educational attainment affect the function of brain networks thought to support how older adults perform tasks, for example, a task that measures how quickly someone is able to suppress distraction. “I was able to address that question for one specific network that seemed to be very related to how well people did the task,” says Marco. “Older, well-educated adults that performed the task well seemed to do so because of the benefit from educational attainment on that particular network.”
The study, which used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), measured how tightly coupled activity within a network remains in different brain regions over time. Dr. Pipoly outlined these findings in his first author publication out in the July 2024 issue of Journals of Gerontology Series B, accepted in May. The paper is titled “Educational Attainment Moderates Task-state Control Network Connectivity Relations to Response Conflict Among Healthy Older Adults,” (https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbae077), and was co-authored with Drs. Hyun Kyu Lee, Hazeltine, and Voss.
Marco’s dissertation, a combination of older and newer study findings representing new knowledge he has generated on the path to his doctorate, is titled “Individual Differences in Cognitive Aging: The Cognitive Reserve Hypothesis in Executive Function.” He’ll continue to explore the subject of modifiable factors in aging as a post-doctoral scholar working in the Wig lab at the Center for Vital Longevity at UT-Dallas.
“Dr. Wig has a research program dedicated to this topic, focusing on measures that really ties how life experience shapes the brain’s functions with increased age — measures that say what’s the consequence or benefit of these experiences you have accumulated for many years,” says Marco.
Those experiences include higher “allostatic load” or cumulative stress. “We’ll complete a series of measures and get biological samples. These measures provide estimates of where your stress is now and where it has likely been for the last 20 years. We think this information will tell us how your brain’s function will continue on as you age . It’s very sophisticated work.” Dr. Wig, he says, is “really a field leader with that kind of stuff.”
The move to Texas is, in part, a return for Marco, who spent some of his early childhood in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. “I’m excited about the new role and furthering my skills as an independent scientist. I am beyond excited to continue this career and grow my own research program,” he says. “It feels like I’m launching on a new adventure.”
— Emery Styron