A Wisconsin Partnership Program (WPP) postdoctoral grant program, launched in 2024, is designed to provide crucial funding to support the work and career development of postdoctoral trainees, postdoctoral fellows, clinical fellows and research associates at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
In collaboration with the supervising mentor who nominated them, grant recipients like Jea Woo Kang, PhD, are using their awards to conduct research or education projects or pursue professional development opportunities to advance their careers.
The lab of Barbara Bendlin, PhD, professor, Department of Medicine, is interested in which lifestyle factors lead to healthy brain aging and which lead to pathology such as Alzheimer’s disease. The group has been studying the connections between the changes in the gut microbiome in people with Alzheimer’s disease for nearly 10 years. A large cohort study published in 2023 found that gut inflammation is linked with brain pathology even in the earliest disease stages. Moreover, they found that markers of intestinal inflammation corresponded with cerebrospinal fluid markers of Alzheimer’s disease and reduced verbal memory function even among participants who were not cognitively impaired. Their study points to the idea that gut inflammation may speed the progression toward Alzheimer’s disease.
Post-doctoral fellow Jea Woo Kang, PhD, joined the laboratory from the University of California-Davis, where he studied the effects of prebiotics on gut microbiome. With the help of a Wisconsin Partnership Project 20th Anniversary Postdoctoral grant, Kang and his team will follow participants in the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention (WRAP) study and the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) over time to study how gut microbiome is related to brain changes.
“The Wisconsin Partnership Program funded some of the earliest work in this area and I’m delighted that WPP is now supporting the next generation of researchers, and in particular, Dr. Kang’s impactful work,” Bendlin says. “While we have previously found changes in the gut microbiome among people with Alzheimer’s dementia, and people at risk for dementia, Dr. Kang’s work will be able to tell us more about the mechanisms that link gut and brain, which in turn can inform the development of new disease treatments.”
We talked with Dr. Kang about this research.
Can you broadly describe your research interests?
My field of study focuses on the human gut microbiome and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). My research interests are not only centered on the simple impact of gut microbes on AD but on a broader perspective of the interrelationship among modifiable factors, gut microbiome, biomarkers and brain health and disease.
What does “microbiome” mean?
The microbiome refers to the community of microorganisms (including bacteria, viruses, and fungi), along with their genetic content, functional potential and metabolic products.
What current problems does this research address?
The human gut microbiome is among the modifiable factors that could influence health and disease, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Among the different risk factors for AD, the gut microbiome has gained attention as a possible target for early intervention. This is supported by studies suggesting that communication between the gut and brain may play a role in disease development, with growing evidence linking changes in gut microbes and intestinal dysfunction to AD processes. This project will address gaps in knowledge to understand how the longitudinal changes in gut microbiome composition relate to the progressive characteristics of AD, leveraging longitudinal collection of fecal samples and their corresponding AD fluid biomarkers.
What group of Alzheimer’s patients would benefit from this understanding?
Understanding the microbiome may be especially valuable for individuals at risk for Alzheimer’s disease but without clinical symptoms—often referred to as “silent AD.” This includes cognitively unimpaired individuals who are amyloid-positive or carry genetic risk factors such as the APOE ε4 allele. Microbiome-targeted interventions in this group may help reduce inflammation, support gut–brain signaling, and promote neuroprotection, potentially delaying disease onset. Such strategies may also benefit those with mild cognitive impairment due to AD (MCI-AD) or metabolic comorbidities, where early modulation of the microbiome could slow progression to dementia.
How would information from the microbiome improve diagnosis and treatment for patients?
Microbiome information may improve Alzheimer’s diagnosis and treatment by enabling early detection through microbial or metabolite-based biomarkers, especially in at-risk individuals before symptoms appear. It also supports personalized interventions by identifying microbial patterns linked to inflammation or cognitive decline, guiding diet, probiotics or drug strategies. Additionally, microbiome shifts can help monitor treatment response and may reveal novel therapeutic targets through gut–brain axis pathways.
How do you plan to do this study, and what are the goals and potential outcomes?
This project will follow individuals ages 40 and older enrolled in the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention (WRAP) study and the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) Clinical Core. We will leverage pre-existing data as well as future data to be collected from ongoing visits. Our research group is exceptionally well-positioned to address this by leveraging fecal samples collected among well-characterized participants phenotyped on AD pathology.
Our goal is to find associations between distinct gut microbiome composition and AD biomarkers longitudinally. The preliminary data generated from this project are expected to contribute to identifying associations between AD pathology and the gut microbiome. Successful completion of this study is expected to lead to the identification of new and potentially targetable gut microbes linking the gut microbiome composition to biomarkers related to AD dementia.
How is your WPP post doc research grant helping to advance your research?
The grant is supporting the exploration of the gut microbiome across the Alzheimer’s disease continuum. It allows me to generate essential foundational data that will enable more complex integration of multi-omics datasets — including microbiome, metabolomics and cognitive biomarkers — to identify early microbial signatures and underlying mechanistic pathways associated with brain health.
How does this grant support your career development and future goals?
The grant provides the resources and protected time to build expertise at the intersection of microbiome science, cognitive health and multi-omics integration. It enables me to develop a strong foundation in translational research, expand interdisciplinary collaborations and generate preliminary data critical for future NIH grant applications. Ultimately, it positions me to establish an independent research program focused on microbiome-based strategies for early detection and prevention of Alzheimer’s disease.
Photo by Clint Thayer, UW Department of Medicine
