Dr. Paula C. Bickford joined the Faculty at USF in 2001 and is Professor of Neurosurgery and Pharmacology and is a member of the Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair at USF. Dr. Bickford is a Research Career Scientist at the James A. Haley VAH in Tampa.  Dr. Bickford recieved her B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Vermont in 1978 and her Ph.D. in Pharmacology in 1984 at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.  As a graduate student Dr. Bickford was the first recipient of the Walter Nicolai Prize in Biomedical Gerontology awarded by the American Aging Association and her career has grown from there.  Her post-doctoral fellowship was at the VAMC in Denver with Dr. Barry Hoffer as mentor and she studied regeneration of CNS neurons using transplantation techniques and was first author on a paper demonstrating that human fetal CNS tissues could be grown in the ocular chamber of rats and studied with electrophysiological techniques that was published in PNAS in 1987.  She continued her work on studying age-related changes in the CNS and was awarded her first independent grant from the VA in 1988 to study the intrinsic versus extrinsic influences on brain aging by examining fetal CNS tissues grafted into different aged rats.  Since that time she has continued her studies of aging and neurodegenerative disease with an interest in translation studies. Dr. Bickford has performed ground breaking work on the effects of fruits and vegetables that are high in antioxidants to reverse age-related deficits in learning and memory and in other biochemical and physiological markers.  Her entire career has been dedicated to the study of aging and the role of oxidative stress.   She was the President of the American Aging Association in 2002 and has served on its governing board off and on for the past 15 years.  

Dr. Bickford's research has focused on the role of oxidative stress in aging with a specific emphasis on age-related changes in cerebellar b-adrenergic signal transduction and its role in motor learning. Her work now includes studies of anti-inflamatory mechanisms as well as stem cell approaches to slow brain aging and treat neurodegenerative diseases.  She has shown that nutritional approaches such as blueberries or spirulina are also effective neuroprotective treatment strategies for Parkinson's disease models and in models of stroke.  She is currently with other members of the Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair on nutritional therapeutice approaches to ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases.

This pre-clinical work is extremely exciting and Dr. Bickford is now poised to translate this research to humans and is working with other scientists at USF and the VA to accomplish this goal.  Dr. Bickford is dedicated to studies of oxidative stress and inflammation and its effects on aging and age-related diseases such as Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's Disease, cerebral ischemia and ALS. 

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Mesches, M.H., Gemma, C., Veng, L.M., Allgeier, C., Young, D.A., Browning, M.D., and Bickford, P.C., Sulindac, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, improves memory and increases NMDA receptor subunits in aged Fischer 344 rats. Neurobiology of Aging, 25: 315-324, 2004.

Zuch, C.L., David, D., Ujhelyi, L., Hudson, J., Gerhardt, G.A., Kaplan, P.L. and Bickford P.C. Beneficial effects of intraventricularly administered BMP-7 following a striatal 6-hydroxydopamine lesion. Brain Res., 1010: 10 - 16, 2004.

Kaufmann JA, Perez M, Zhang, W. Holmes, D.B., Bickford PC, Taglialatela G: Free radical-dependent nuclear localization of BCL-2 in the CNS of aged fisher-344 rats. J. Neurochem, 87: 981-994, 2003.

Gemma, C., Mesches, M.H., Sepesi,B., Choo, K., Holmes,D.B., Bickford, P.C. Diets enriched in foods with high antioxidant activity reverse age-induced decreases in cerebellar b-adrenergic function and increases in proinflammatory cytokines. J. Neuroscience, 22: 6114-6120, 2002.

Cartford, M.C., Gemma, C., and Bickford P.C. Eighteen Month Old F344 Rats fed Spinach-enriched diet show improved Delay Classical eyeblink conditioning and reduced expression of TNF-alpha and TNF-beta in cerebellum, J. Neuroscience, 22: 5813-5816, 2002.
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Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair
Department of Neurosurgery
USF College of Medicine
 FL 33612
813-974-3154