Dr. Amanda Carey
2017 Presentation Title – Mitigating the Effects of High Fat Diet in the Brain with Berry Supplementation
Amanda N. Carey, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Simmons College in Boston, MA, USA.
She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Northeastern University in 2010. Her doctoral research was funded by an NRSA training grant and examined the effects of the HIV viral protein Tat on the brain and behavior using a transgenic mouse model. Specifically, she elucidated the role of Tat protein in the mediation of cognitive deficits associated with a neurodegenerative condition called NeuroAIDS. Also prior to her academic appointment at
Simmons, Dr. Carey was a Postdoctoral Research Affiliate at Tufts Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA). She studied how nutrition can modulate age-related behavioral and neurochemical changes. She is continuing to investigate the effects of diet on the brain and behavior in her research laboratory at Simmons College. Dr. Carey’s current research examines how a high fat diet can affect behavior and brain functioning and the cognitive and neurological benefits of eating high antioxidant berries. However, these two research tracks are not mutually exclusive. She is engaged in projects investigating if blueberry and raspberry supplementation of a high fat diet can prevent impairments in spatial memory and novel object recognition. She is also researching if supplementation with berries can increase plasticity in the brains of mice fed high fat diet.
She is presently the PI on an industry-sponsored award investigating the ability of red raspberry supplementation to prevent or allay the cognitive, neurological and metabolic alterations induced by consumption of a high fat diet.
Dr. Carey spends a significant amount of her time mentoring and involving undergraduates in her research. She has authored over 25 publications that have been cited over 100 times and is on the editorial board for the journal Nutritional Neuroscience. In her free time she likes to Irish dance.