Pursuing discovery while guiding undergraduate students into careers in science

Three innovative awards will support Tana Pottorf, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Neuroscience at The Ohio State University College of Medicine and in the Phil Popovich Laboratory at the college, in her work to advance neuroimmunology research and connect undergraduate students to mentors in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

The awards include an individual grant through Wings for Life for her study, titled “Promoting Functional Recovery Through Temporal Control of TREM2,” and a post-doctoral research fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW). She is also one of five female postdoctoral scientists nationwide to receive a 2026 grant from the L’Oréal USA For Women in Science program, which supports the next generation of female scientists.

Dr. Pottorf intends to partner with undergraduate programs at The Ohio State University to build an accessible online platform where learners can view exceptional presentations on innovative research and explore unique pathways to science forged by women in STEM fields.

At the same time, she’ll expand her research findings on how the immune system can be targeted to improve recovery after spinal cord injury.

While some levels of neural inflammation after an injury are necessary and demonstrate that the body is responding to the damage, ensuring that inflammation doesn’t respond for too long or too aggressively is key to healing. This focus expands existing research on a receptor called triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2 (TREM2), which is:

• Expressed on myeloid cells, such as monocytes, microglia and other immune cells, that act as a type of switch with different effects, beneficial and detrimental, depending on each individual cell's exact context. 
• A novel area of study in spinal cord injury research that compares early or late time points of injury and expression in different areas, such as at the injury site where gross amounts of damage and inflammation occur, and at other bodily locations, including the lesion-remote spinal cord, where immune cells also infiltrate.
• A factor in neuron rewiring below the injury site, which can lead to immune susceptibility and systemic complications called dysautonomia, or dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system.
• Key to determining which TREM2-expressing cells exert the greatest influence on cell repair or cell death, whether activity levels can be adjusted at injury or below injury to maximize benefit and whether temporal modulation can also occur in the spinal cord.

The team is collaborating with Ryan Gilbert, PhD, professor and department chair of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology, to develop a custom nanofiber that, when placed into the spinal cord, will degrade over time. Its success could provide spatial and time specificity needed for localized drug delivery that doesn’t affect peripheral immune systems or induce more inflammation.