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Peg Nopoulos, portrait
Peg Nopoulos, MD

Born, raised, and trained in Iowa, Peg Nopoulos (89MD, 93R, 94F) has built an internationally recognized Huntington’s disease research program virtually in her own backyard.  

“You don’t have to go to Emerald City to know that there’s no place like home,” she says.

Nopoulos, who completed all of her medical training at the University of Iowa and became chair and departmental executive officer of the Department of Psychiatry in 2018, has devoted much of her career to studying and treating Huntington’s disease (HD), a progressive and ultimately fatal illness. 

Her research program aims to uncover the complex role of the gene linked to HD. Although it may cause the debilitating disease, marked by diminished cognitive skills and disrupted motor function, the gene has also been shown to be critical for brain development. 

With $18 million in new grant funding from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, her lab’s decade-long study will soon expand to five additional sites and enroll children across the country who are at risk for developing HD. 
 

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Peg Nopoulos Laboratory

Research that is designed to evaluate brain development and its relationship to long term behavioral, cognitive, and emotional outcome.