Salk’s Year of Brain Health

Written by Isabella Davis We are living longer than ever. Today, the average US citizen lives to 79. But as the years roll on, cognitive decline can creep in—one sixth of adults over 65 and one third over 85 will get Alzheimer’s disease.  We have heard a lot of tips for maintaining health in old age, like eat well, exercise, and get a good night’s sleep. At Salk, we want to know the mechanisms behind those beneficial habits. Gerald joyce These statistics are why the increase in lifespan is accompanied by a new attention to healthspan—our ability to not just live longer, but also to maintain health in those extended years. The question is: How? How can we extend our healthspan, especially in the brain to avoid aging-related cognitive decline? The San Diego Women’s Soccer League may have some answers. “I fell in love with the sport. I fell in love with the camaraderie. And here we are 40-some years later,” says Nancy Petit, an 81-year-old league player. “We can laugh on the soccer field, and we can get serious on the soccer field.”  But never too serious. Petit laughs as she shares that the players have so much fun…

Tim Ball and the Facilities Services Team: Maintaining the Life of the Institute

Every day, soft morning light washes across Louis Kahn’s concrete walls as the Pacific fog lifts over the courtyard. From above, the campus appears still, its laboratories quiet beneath the steady rhythm of the River of Life water feature flowing toward the horizon. But beneath that calm exterior, the Institute is already awake. At Salk, discovery never truly stops. Neither do the systems nor the people that sustain it. Air-handling systems circulate air through laboratories with microscopic precision. Chilled water moves through underground infrastructure. Engineers monitor temperatures critical to sensitive experiments. And the overnight watch teams and custodians complete their final rounds before researchers begin arriving for the day. Tim Ball, executive director of Facilities Services and Operations, describes Salk as a living organism. “Power. Water,” Ball says. “That’s the life of the Institute.” The Central Plant and the central meaning Ball wasn’t actively looking for a new job when he was recruited to Salk nearly 18 years ago. At the time, he was working in Long Beach, commuting from Oceanside, and raising his young son. A former colleague encouraged him to consider the opportunity. Before arriving at Salk, Ball had spent years working in higher education facilities operations, developing…

Adam Farsheed: Growing brains, shaping minds

Adam Farsheed, PhD, is a problem solver. His curiosity about the world is clearly that of an engineer, driven by mathematics and physics. But Farsheed is not all brains—he also leads with his heart, caring deeply for people and allowing those relationships to shape and inspire his path.  “My dad has a crazy life story,” says Farsheed. “In his freshman year at the University of Southern California, he became stranded with no money when his government back home in Iran—which his dad worked for—was overthrown.” Farsheed’s father’s story broke his world open at an early age, pulling him away from the typically small world of adolescence. With time, his father dug himself out of the hole he had been dropped in, eventually starting his own software company. “My dad’s story showed me a lot of life is luck. I just got luckier than people who did not have my starting point,” he says. “And because of that, I always try to help people as much as possible.” My biggest motivation is to mentor, teach, and make positive change in the world. I love my research endlessly, but giving back is where I find the most fulfillment. If I’m not doing that,…

Jamie Blum: Three to five pounds of immune decisions every day

Jamie Blum, PhD, has always been curious about what we eat and why it matters. Now, as a Salk assistant professor, she’s asking the question at the molecular level, and the answers could one day change how we think about food allergies. Growing up in rural upstate New York, Jamie Blum wasn’t thinking about immunology. She was mostly thinking about snacks—specifically, the ones she wasn’t allowed to have. Her parents kept a strict household when it came to food: no high-fructose corn syrup, no hydrogenated oils. While her friends got the fun stuff, Blum got curious. Why did those ingredients matter? What were they actually doing inside the body? That early question, as it turns out, set the course for her career. Today, Blum runs a lab at the Salk Institute that sits squarely at the intersection of nutrition, plant biology, and immunology. She joined Salk in the fall of 2025, drawn by the Institute’s collaborative culture and its rare willingness to support foundational, open-ended science that most research institutions overlook. After all, before the right treatments can exist, someone must ask the right questions. How did you wind up here, as a scientist at Salk? JB: It has been…

Remembering Suzanne Bourgeois: She cracked one of biology’s earliest codes, then made sure the story of how Salk came to be was never lost

Suzanne Bourgeois, PhD, had a knack for finding things that others had overlooked. In the 1960s, when the molecular machinery behind gene regulation was still largely a mystery, she identified something no one had proved before: that the protein responsible for switching a gene off was real, measurable, and could be studied in precise detail. As the founder of Salk’s Regulatory Biology Laboratory, Bourgeois studied the regulation of gene expression—the process cells use to turn genes “on” or “off”—using the bacterial lactose (lac) operon as a model system. In the 1960s, when little was known about the circuit, Bourgeois demonstrated that the lac repressor was a protein. She used the system to characterize, for the first time, the interaction between a regulatory protein and DNA. She later studied gene regulation in animal cells and eventually identified compounds that could help reverse multidrug resistance in cancer. From that foundation, Bourgeois went on to ask bigger questions, eventually identifying compounds with the potential to help overcome one of cancer treatment’s most stubborn problems: the ability of tumors to resist multiple drugs at once. Her National Institutes of Health research grant funding continued through 1994, a telling measure of how seriously the scientific…