Alberto Costa, M.D., Ph.D
Alberto Costa is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Dr. Costa has spent over 15 years investigating the pathophysiology and potential pharmacotherapeutic approaches to Down syndrome. His research team was the first to demonstrate learning and memory-enhancing effects of the Alzheimer’s disease drug memantine on a mouse model of Down syndrome. Recently, he has built off of these findings and conceived and led the implementation, data collection, and analysis for the first translational clinical trial in the field of Down syndrome.
Dr. Costa received his M.D. from the State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and a Ph.D in Biophysics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He trained as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, University of Maryland, School of Medicine, and was a Research Associate at the Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine.
As an independent investigator, he first held the position of Research Scientist at The Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Maine. He then moved to the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute/University of Denver, where he served as an Institute Scientist/Research Associate Professor for five years before moving to his current position at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine.
He is the recipient of the “Science Scholar Award” from the National Down Syndrome Society, New York, and the “Josephine Mills Research Award for Exceptional Contribution to Research in Down Syndrome,” from the Down Syndrome Research Foundation, British Columbia, Canada. His daughter, Tyche, was born 16 years ago with Down syndrome and is the motivation and inspiration behind his research.