The Cognitive Disorders Research Lab is a research lab at the University of Toledo. Led by Dr. Robert E. Smith, the lab focuses on the study of cognitive disorders, including Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. The lab is part of the Department of Neurosciences at the University of Toledo College of Medicine and Life Sciences.

Our lab is interested in discovering the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie cognitive disorders, particularly Schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease. We use a variety of techniques to study these disorders, including state-of-the-art kinase activity assays, next generation sequencing, and animal models of disease. Our goal is to understand the neuropathology of diseases, identify novel targets for therapeutic intervention and to develop new treatments for these devastating disorders.

As a secondary goal, we are focused on developing novel software tools and techniques to accelerate the analysis of multi-omics data. We are particularly interested in developing tools that can be used to analyze large-scale, multi-omics datasets.

• Kinome Random Sampling Analysis (KRSA)
• Kaleidoscope - Live Version
• drugfindR
• Creedenzymatic

1. Creeden JF, Kipp ZA, Xu M, Flight RM, Moseley HNB, Martinez GJ, et al. Hepatic kinome atlas: An in‐depth identification of kinase pathways in liver fibrosis of humans and rodents. Hepatology. 2022 Apr 8;hep.32467.
2. Alganem K, Hamoud AR, Creeden JF, Henkel ND, Imami AS, Joyce AW, et al. The active kinome: The modern view of how active protein kinase networks fit in biological research. Current Opinion in Pharmacology. 2022 Feb 1;62:117–29.
3. O’Donovan SM, Imami A, Eby H, Henkel ND, Creeden JF, Asah S, et al. Identification of candidate repurposable drugs to combat COVID-19 using a signature-based approach. Scientific Reports. 2021 Dec 24;11(1):4495.
4. Imami AS, McCullumsmith RE, O’Donovan SM. Strategies to identify candidate repurposable drugs: COVID-19 treatment as a case example. Transl Psychiatry. 2021 Nov 16;11(1):591.
5. Creeden JF, Imami AS, Eby HM, Gillman C, Becker KN, Reigle J, et al. Fluoxetine as an anti-inflammatory therapy in SARS-CoV-2 infection. Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy. 2021 Jun 1;138:111437.
6. Creeden JF, Alganem K, Imami AS, Brunicardi FC, Liu SH, Shukla R, et al. Kinome Array Profiling of Patient-Derived Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma Identifies Differentially Active Protein Tyrosine Kinases. International Journal of Molecular Sciences. 2020 Jan;21(22):8679.
7. Creeden JF, Alganem K, Imami AS, Henkel ND, Brunicardi FC, Liu SH, et al. Emerging Kinase Therapeutic Targets in Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma and Pancreatic Cancer Desmoplasia. International Journal of Molecular Sciences. 2020 Jan;21(22):8823.
8. Imami AS, O’donovan SM, Creeden JF, Wu X, Eby H, McCullumsmith CB, et al. Oxytocin’s anti-inflammatory and proimmune functions in covid-19: A transcriptomic signature-based approach. Physiological Genomics. 2020;
9. DePasquale EAK, Alganem K, Bentea E, Nawreen N, McGuire JL, Tomar T, et al. KRSA: An R package and R Shiny web application for an end-to-end upstream kinase analysis of kinome array data. PLOS ONE. 2021 Dec 17;16(12):e0260440.
10. Khaled Alganem, Ali S. Imami, Smita Sahay, Hunter Eby, Taylen O. Arvay, Mackenzie Abel, Xiaolu Zhang, William Brett McIntyre, Jiwon Lee, Christy Au-Yeung, Roshanak Asgariroozbehani, Roshni Panda, Rammohan Shukla, Sinead M. O'Donovan, Margaret Hahn, Jarek Meller, Robert McCullumsmith. Kaleidoscope: A Bioinformatics Web Application for In Silico Exploration of Omics Data. 6 (2023): 327-338.
11. Sahay S, Devine EA, McCullumsmith RE, O’Donovan SM. Adenosine Receptor mRNA Expression in Frontal Cortical Neurons in Schizophrenia. Cells. 2024; 13(1):32.
12. Sahay S, Henkel ND, Vargas CF-A, McCullumsmith RE, O’Donovan SM. Activity of Protein Kinase A in the Frontal Cortex in Schizophrenia. Brain Sciences. 2024; 14(1):13.

• Dr. Robert E. Smith, MD, PhD
• Dr. Sinead O'Donovan, PhD

• Abdul-rizaq Hamoud, PhD Candidate
• Dr. Ali S. Imami, MBBS, MS, PhD Candidate
• Smita Sahay, MD, PhD Candidate
• Jennifer Nguyen, MS, PhD Candidate
• William G. Ryan V, MS, PhD Candidate
• Hunter Eby, MS, PhD Candidate
• Taylen O. Arvay, MSBS Student

• Dr. Nicholas Henkel, MD, PhD
• Dr. Rawan Alnafisah, PhD
• Dr. Justin F. Creeden, MD, PhD
• Dr. Khaled Alganem, PhD
• Alexandra Kruzel, MS
• Elizabeth Shedroff, MS
• Alex Joyce, MS
• Vineet Reddy, MS
• Evelyn A. Bates, MS
• Scott Miruzzi, MS
• Mackenzie Abel, MS
• Mahmoud Eladawi

• Dr. Jarek Meller, PhD -- Meller Lab
• Dr. Conseulo Walss-Bass, PhD -- Walss-Bass Lab
• Dr. Harry Pantazopoulos, PhD -- Pantazopoulos Lab
• Dr. Barbara Gisabella, PhD -- Gisabella Lab
• Dr. Zhexing Wen, PhD -- Laboratory for Neurobiology of Psychiatric Disorders
• Dr. Amy J. Ramsey, PhD -- Ramsey Lab
• Dr. Sidharth Mahapatra, MD, PhD -- Mahapatra Lab
• Dr. Sadik Khuder