Dr. Mervis received his PhD in Neurosciences at Northern Illinois University. After completing a post-doctoral fellowship in Anatomy at the Tulane University School of Medicine he was an instructor in the Department of Anatomy at The Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York (and taught Neuroanatomy and Gross Anatomy). He then moved to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Department of Neuropathology where he was Director of the Electron Microscopy Facility and was involved in the Neuropathology of Alzheimer's Disease research program. Subsequently, at The Ohio State University College of Medicine he was associate professor in Medicine (Associate Director of Research in the Office of Geriatrics and Gerontology) and Neuropathology (Director, Brain Aging and Neuroplasticity Research Program). He then also started his company, Neurostructural Research Labs – a non-profit contract research organization – which specializes in highly morphometric assessment of dendritic parameters of neural circuitry and currently has contracts, grants, and collaborative research projects with various NIH laboratories (e.g., NIA, EPA), pharmaceutical and biotech companies, and other academic institutions.

Dr. Ron Mervis specializes in the evaluation and analyses of dendritic and synaptic changes -- e.g., alterations in neural circuitry and associated neuropathology -- that represent the underlying morphological bases for cognitive and behavioral dysfunction. Many of these studies utilize mice with altered genotypes such as knock-out, mutant, or transgenic models. Recent and ongoing studies in his laboratory include evaluation of changes in dendritic branching and spines in:

• Developmental disorders such as animal models of Fragile X syndrome (a major cause of mental retardation) and Niemann-Pick disease (a metabolic storage disorder)
• An animal model of diabetes and its deleterious effects on the developing and aging brain.
• Animal models of autism and schizophrenia
• Neurotoxicology and the effects of PCBs and dioxin-like compounds on the developing cortex, hippocampus, and cerebellum.
• Evaluation of a recently developed triple transgenic mouse model of Alzheimer's disease, quantifying the effects of developing senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles on disruption of cortical and hippocampal circuitry.
• Assessing the role of acute and chronic stress on neuronal damage in cortex and hippocampus.
• Assessing the role of environmental conditions on the normal aging brain and in an animal model of Alzheimer's disease.
• Stem Cell studies evaluating the effects of human umbilical cord blood on repairing damaged hippocampal circuitry
• Assessing the effects of drug intervention strategy to treat brain damage in animal models of Alzheimer's disease and brain injury.