Ephraim F. Trakhtenberg, PhD

Dr. Ephraim Trakhtenberg is an assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Connecticut Medical School, where he leads the Neuroregeneration Laboratory. Dr. Trakhtenberg received an MS degree in biological sciences from Stanford University and a PhD in neuroscience from the University Of Miami Miller School Of Medicine. He did a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience at Harvard Medical School, Boston Children’s Hospital. During his doctoral and post-doctoral work under the mentorship of Jeffrey Goldberg, MD, PhD, and Larry Benowitz, PhD, Dr. Trakhtenberg discovered (1) how Set-β and PP2A proteins regulate axon growth; (2) the role of serotonin receptor 2C in neurite growth and processing of visual information; and (3) that inhibiting the transcription factor Klf9 acts synergistically with zinc chelation in stimulating axon regeneration. In addition, in collaboration with the Harvard Medical School bioinformatics team, he discovered (4) how global parameters of the transcriptome differ between various cell types. These discoveries have been published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Biological Chemistry, Developmental Neurobiology, and Scientific Reports. Dr. Trakhtenberg is a reviewer for a number of international journals such as Neuropharmacology, PLOS One, and Scientific Reports. His research accomplishments have been recognized through fellowship awards, junior investigators awards, and other awards. The current focus of Dr. Trakhtenberg’s research is on solving the fundamental problem of the failure of CNS projection neurons to regenerate injured axons and developing translational approaches for treating optic neuropathies (eg, glaucoma) and other types of CNS injuries.