Huntington Potter, PhD

Director of Alzheimer’s Disease Programs at the Linda Crnic Institute for Down Syndrome; Director of Rocky Mountain Alzheimer’s Disease Center; Professor and Vice Chair of Basic Research

Dr. Huntington Potter is the former Director of the NIH-National Institute on Aging designated Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center with an emphasis on minorities and is agubernatorial appointee to the Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Advisory Committee. He was the President-elect of the Faculty at the University of South Florida’s College of Medicine until July 2012.

Prior to joining USF in 1998, Dr. Potter studied, researched and taught for 30 years at  Harvard University. He received his AB Cum Laude in Physics and Chemistry from Harvard College in 1972 and went on to earn his MA and PhD, also from Harvard, in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Dr. Potter then spent 13 years on the faculty of the Neurobiology Department at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Potter is credited with the first observation of the Holiday intermediate in genetic recombination, with development of electroporation for gene delivery, and with the discovery of the essential role of inflammation and the amyloid-promoting mechanism of the apoE-4 protein in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease. He also discovered that classical Alzheimer’s disease and Down syndrome, which invariably leads to Alzheimer’s by age 30-40, are mechanistically related to each other and to cancer through the development of cells with abnormal numbers of chromosomes, with important implications for diagnosis and treatment of all three disorders. Read more about Dr. Huntington Potter’s groundbreaking research.

He is author of more than 100 scientific articles and books, is the holder of 15 U.S. and foreign patents, and has sat on numerous scientific advisory and review committees in academia, industry and government. In 1996 Dr. Potter received the American Society for Cell Biology Glenn Foundation Award for “Outstanding Research in Aging”, in 2000 the Kaul Foundation Award for Excellence for “Outstanding Achievements in the Field of Neurobiology and Gerontology” and in 2005 the Tampa Bay Business Journal’s “Health Care Heroes Award” for Health Care Innovation and Research. His electron micrographs of DNA are on permanent exhibit in the National American History Museum of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C.