Lenora Higginbotham, MD

Dr. Higginbotham is a clinician-scientist focused on advancing biomarker discovery for Lewy body dementias (LBDs) using state-of-the-art proteomic approaches. She received early training in proteomic analysis during medical school at the Emory Center for Neurodegenerative Disease, where she gained expertise in sample preparation and mass spectrometry while analyzing brain-derived proteomic signatures in preclinical Alzheimer’s disease, resulting in a first-author publication in Proteomes. During her movement disorders fellowship, she returned to Emory to apply proteomic methods to both Alzheimer’s and parkinsonian disorders and subsequently collaborated with Allan Levey, MD, PhD, and Nicholas Seyfried, PhD, to develop systems-level mass spectrometry pipelines for biomarker discovery. She coauthored a Nature Medicine (2020) study defining consensus co-expression networks in Alzheimer’s disease and led an integrative brain and CSF proteomic analysis published in Science Advances (2020). Supported by an NIH/NINDS K23 award, her recent work includes a last-author publication in Molecular Neurodegeneration (2024) characterizing the network brain proteome of LBD, providing a foundation for ongoing biofluid biomarker discovery.