Dr. Gregory Merz is a talented structural biologist with expertise in cryo-EM recently recruited to the IND at UCSF as an Assistant Adjunct Professor. Dr. Merz earned his PhD from Cornell in the lab of Dr. Brian Crane using EPR spectroscopy to study protein conformational changes. He received his postdoctoral training in Cryo-EM in the Southworth lab (joint with Drs. Stan Prusiner and Bill Degrado). He has more than 5 years of experience using cryo-EM techniques to study the structure and conformation of brain-derived protein amyloid filaments in neurodegenerative diseases. Dr. Merz will work closely with Dr. Kaufman, with additional guidance from Dr. Southworth, and conduct cryo-EM experiments outlined in Objective 1 to determine high-resolution structures of different tau amyloid filament strains purified for iPSC-derived cell culture models of tau aggregation. The proposed research is distinct from Dr. Merz’s previously funded research, since it investigates structures of tau amyloid filaments from cell-based models (iNeurons), a novel area of structural targets for Dr. Merz.