American Heart Association Selects BME’s Jingjing Gao for Career Development Award

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Jingjing Gao

Each year, more than 750,000 people in the U.S. suffer strokes. Now, Jingjing Gao, an assistant professor in the UMass Amherst Biomedical Engineering (BME) Department and an adjunct in the Chemistry Department, has received a three-year, $231,000 Career Development Award from the American Heart Association (AHA) to support her pioneering technique for upgrading rehabilitation in stroke victims. 

Gao will use the AHA award to develop a cutting-edge method for modulating the activity of microglia, or specialized immune cells in the central nervous system, and thereby alleviate inflammation in nerve tissues and improve recovery of patients who have suffered strokes. 

According to the AHA, the Career Development Award supports highly promising healthcare and academic professionals, working in the early years of their first professional appointments, to explore innovative questions or pilot studies that will provide the experience and training necessary to assure their future success as research scientists.

The AHA explains that “The award will develop the research skills to support and greatly enhance the awardee’s chances to obtain and retain a high-quality career position.”

The backstory of Gao’s research for the AHA is that ischemic stroke, when a blood clot blocks a blood vessel in the brain, leads to persistent neuroinflammation, driven largely by activated microglia, an unhealthy process which worsens neuronal damage and impairs recovery. Microglia are specialized immune cells in the central nervous system that play critical functions in brain maintenance, immune defense, and response to injury. However, their activation following strokes leads to incessant inflammation of nerve tissue.

Gao explains that “Current therapeutics for modulating microglial activity lack specificity or fail to penetrate the blood-brain barrier.” 

According to Gao, “This project aims to develop a precision nanoparticle platform for targeted RNA [ribonucleic acid] delivery to microglia, enabling reprogramming toward an anti-inflammatory, reparative phenotype to mitigate neuroinflammation and enhance post-stroke recovery.” RNA is a vital molecule in all living cells that plays a significant role in protein synthesis and gene regulation.

Gao explains that the first goal in her AHA research will focus on “high-throughput, in vivo screening of diverse, barcoded, lipid nanoparticles to identify formulations that selectively cross the blood-brain barrier and target microglia in a mouse-stroke model.” Gao’s second goal will be to evaluate the therapeutic potential of RNA-loaded nanoparticles carrying modulated RNAs “to reprogram microglia, reduce neuroinflammation, preserve blood-brain barrier integrity, and improve functional recovery through molecular, histological, and behavioral assessments.”

As Gao concludes, “This research addresses a critical gap by combining innovative nanoparticle engineering and RNA therapeutics for targeted immunomodulation in ischemic stroke.”

In the fall of 2025, Gao also received a three-year, $200,000 award from the Alzheimer’s Association International Research Grant Program to support her research into a groundbreaking Alzheimer’s treatment involving microglia.

Gao’s research expertise focuses on translational strategies to develop gene therapies for neurological disorders or chronic diseases. Gao’s lab works at the interface of material science, chemistry, biology, and biomedical engineering to promote healthy aging with a materials-centric approach and to innovate the treatments for degenerative diseases. (April 2026)