The virologist found the neuroscience collaborators and funding he needed at the Tulane Brain Institute.
A virologist by training, Kevin Zwezdaryk has spent his career investigating how viruses alter cells. But to pursue a specific question — whether viral infections impact cognition, such as Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia — he needed expertise outside his field. He found it at the Tulane Brain Institute.
Zwezdaryk, an assistant professor of microbiology and immunology in the Tulane School of Medicine, isn’t a neuroscientist. By funding his early work and connecting him with neuroscientists, the Tulane Brain Institute has been instrumental in advancing his research. Beyond Alzheimer’s and dementia, he’s also involved in studies of how viruses such as long COVID and Ebola affect the brain.
Zwezdaryk has worked primarily with neuroscientist Elizabeth Engler-Chiurazzi, though many other Brain Institute colleagues have contributed. “Without their expertise, these projects would not have secured the current level of funding and success."
The collaboration has been a two-way exchange of expertise. “Sharing that knowledge and those approaches has been really beneficial,” he said. Zwezdaryk and Engler-Chiurazzi have collaborated on two pilot grants from the Brain Institute — one funded by the Priddy family and one by the Panetta family.
Zwezdaryk’s lab integrates cutting-edge techniques to study cells and generates enormous amounts of data, far too much for any lab to analyze by hand. AI tools typically handle small datasets well but struggle with large ones, so Zwezdaryk’s lab was one of just ten worldwide invited to beta-test a new artificial intelligence platform designed for datasets this large. The AI identifies patterns and surfaces the most important findings, which the researchers then test in follow-up experiments. Rather than starting with a hypothesis, his team’s algorithms identify what’s worth investigating, and the researchers go from there.
“It reverses the scientific process,” Zwezdaryk explained. “Based on all this data, you’re at the most important step right off the bat.” The Brain Institute supported his lab’s AI research. The Brain Institute’s interdisciplinary model, Zwezdaryk said, is the future of science. “Considering how complex the problems are now in science, one person doesn’t hold all the knowledge to understand these problems anymore. It really has to be interdisciplinary collaborations.”
