Rate My Professor Alfredo Oliveros

The Oliveros Lab examines regenerative neurobiology in disease states that impair cognitive function and reward-motivated behavior, with particular emphasis on chemotherapy-induced cognitive impairment, or chemobrain, which detrimentally affects up to 75% of cancer survivors through cognitive and mood dysfunctions, impaired neural stem cell development, and neuroinflammation. Utilizing a multidisciplinary approach, the lab integrates preclinical mouse models, behavioral assays such as the Morris water maze, novel object recognition, elevated plus maze, and 5-choice serial reaction time task for operant conditioning; advanced techniques including RNA sequencing, proteomics, bioinformatic pathway analysis, stereotaxic AAV-Cre viral targeting in specific brain regions, molecular biology methods, immunofluorescence, and confocal microscopy. This enables investigation of molecular mechanisms by which chemotherapies disrupt hippocampal neurogenesis—tracked via colocalized MCM2 and DCX markers in the dentate gyrus—and striatal function, leading to deficits in learning, memory, attention, and emotive behavior. Additional projects probe neuroinflammatory activation of microglia across hippocampus, cortex, and striatum, as well as innate and adaptive immune responses in the meningeal compartment contributing to cognitive decline. Notable publications include Oliveros A et al., "Blockade of the adenosine A2A receptor protects against cisplatin induced cognitive impairments" (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 2022, PMID: 35867768); Oliveros A et al., "Chemobrain: An accelerated aging process linking adenosine A2A receptor signaling in cancer survivors" (Int. Rev. Neurobiology, 2023, PMID: 37741694); Rashid MA et al., "The selective cyclooxygenase-2 inhibitor NS398 ameliorates cisplatin-induced impairments in mitochondrial and cognitive function" (Front. Mol. Neurosci., 2023, PMID: 38095013); and Yoo KH et al., "Nicotinamide mononucleotide prevents cisplatin-induced cognitive impairments" (Cancer Res., 2021).