Professor Colin Smith
Chair of Neuropathology; Director of Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences

- Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences
- Centre for Comparative Pathology
Contact details
- Tel: +44 (0)131 465 9573
- Email: Col.Smith@ed.ac.uk
Background
I graduated MBChB from Glasgow 1992, and FRCPath 2000. I was appointed Senior Lecturer in Pathology in 2001 and I have both a diagnostic and research component to my job plan. My main research interests lie around neurotrauma and neurovascular disease, and particularly assessment of human tissue in these disorders.
Research summary
Traumatic brain injury and cerebrovascular disease are two very different processes which injure the brain, but which both produce devastating injuries to the patients affected. My research looks at how the brain is injured and how it responds to those injuries. While animal models help us understand basic processes, only by looking at human brains will we fully understand the processes that can be modified by drug therapies and hopefully improve the lives of patients affected by these common conditions.
Research aims and areas of interest
- Neurotrauma- assessing the pathological changes associated with mild head injury, both single impact and repeated impacts. Specifically we will focus on the human synapse as a target for early modifications in head injury
- Neurovascular disease- we focus specifically on small vessel disease, and we ar elooking at laser-captured small vessels from cases with intracerebral haemorrhage and comparing these with normal age-matched controls. This approach will help address the hypothesis that small vessels are inherently abnormal and can be modified by other factors to predispose to lacunar infarcts and haemorrhage
Collaborators
Local
- Professor Seth Grant (Centre for Neuroregeneration); Professor Joanna Wardlaw (Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences); Professor Tom Gillingwater (Centre for Integrative Physiology), Dr Tara Spires-Jones (Centre for Cognitive and Neural Systems), Dr Sharon Abrahams (School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences)
National
- Professor John Hardy, Dr Mina Ryten (Institute of Neurology, University College London)
International
- Professor Susan Margulies (University of Pennsylvania), Professor Tina Duhaime (Harvard Medical School)
Sources of funding
- Medical Research Council (Edinburgh Brain Bank)
- National Institutes of Health (neurotrauma research)
-
Synaptic oligomeric tau in Alzheimer’s disease – a potential culprit in the spread of tau pathology through the brain
In:
Neuron
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2023.04.020
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print) -
Cell-autonomous immune dysfunction driven by disrupted autophagy in C9orf72-ALS iPSC-derived microglia contributes to neurodegeneration
In:
Science Advances
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abq0651
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Author Correction: Nox2 dependent redox-regulation of microglial response to amyloid-β stimulation and microgliosis in aging
In:
Scientific Reports, vol. 13, pp. 5294
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-31194-7
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Neurogranin in Alzheimer’s disease and ageing: a human post-mortem study
(9 pages)
In:
Neurobiology of disease, vol. 177
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nbd.2023.105991
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Synaptic resilience is associated with maintained cognition during ageing
In:
Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/alz.12894
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print)