Emory University
Grady Memorial Hospital
Atlanta, Georgia
Dr. David Gimbel splits his time between the operating room, directing neurotrauma care at Grady Memorial Hospital, and the laboratory, where his team studies why traumatic brain injury can lead to lasting cognitive dysfunction — and its striking overlap with Alzheimer's disease.
Dr. Gimbel wears two hats. As a neurosurgeon, he is Director of Neurotrauma at Grady Memorial Hospital — Atlanta's only Level I trauma center, and one of the busiest trauma centers in the country, treating more than 9,000 trauma activations a year. As a scientist, he runs a laboratory at Emory dedicated to understanding the biology of traumatic brain injury.
Grady's mission is to care for anyone who walks through its doors, and its trauma program sees an enormous volume and range of neurotrauma, including traumatic brain injury and spinal cord injury. That clinical experience, seeing firsthand how differently patients recover from similar injuries, is what shapes the lab's research.
Before becoming a neurosurgeon, Dr. Gimbel trained in Alzheimer's disease research at Yale, where he helped identify a protein that plays a key role in the disease. Now, combining that background with what he sees clinically at Grady, his lab asks a basic question: does that same protein connect traumatic brain injury to Alzheimer's disease — and could blocking it, even after an injury has already happened, help protect the brain?
That question is being pursued through a close, ongoing collaboration between Emory and Yale — pairing Dr. Gimbel's clinical neurotrauma experience and laboratory at Emory with the Strittmatter Lab at Yale, where he trained and where much of the foundational science on this protein was first developed.
Three linked programs — from a single molecule, to a mouse model of repetitive injury, to patient cerebrospinal fluid.
PrPC acts as a neuronal receptor for toxic amyloid-beta oligomers in Alzheimer's disease. We test whether that same interaction drives brain injury after head trauma, and whether an oral PrPC antagonist can block it therapeutically, not just prophylactically.
→ Molecular & PharmacologicalA repeated mild closed head injury (rmCHI) mouse model lets us track chronic spatial memory deficits, phospho-tau accumulation, and persistent neuronal hyperactivity weeks after the last impact — and how PrPC deletion or blockade normalizes each of them.
→ In Vivo & BehavioralLarge-scale proteomic profiling of cerebrospinal fluid from TBI patients, mapped against a validated Alzheimer's disease proteomic subtyping framework, to ask how much molecular overlap exists between traumatic and neurodegenerative disease.
→ Human Cohorts & ComputationalThe Gimbel Lab was founded in 2020 at Emory; its first primary paper is currently under review. Dr. Gimbel's foundational research spans his earlier work at Yale.
Based in the Department of Neurosurgery at Emory, working closely with collaborators at Yale, in Emory's Department of Biochemistry, and across Atlanta, including at Morehouse School of Medicine and Georgia Tech.
Dr. Gimbel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Emory University and Director of Neurotrauma at Grady Memorial Hospital, Atlanta's Level I trauma center. He also serves as Adjunct Clinical Professor of Surgery at Morehouse School of Medicine, where he directs the third-year neurosurgical clerkship, and as an Unaffiliated Neurotrauma Consultant for the National Football League, performing concussion evaluations on the sidelines during games.
He trained at Yale, earning a BS in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, an MD, and a Master of Health Science, before completing his neurosurgery residency (serving as chief resident) at Yale New Haven Hospital and a complex spine surgery fellowship at the University of Cincinnati. His interest in the molecular basis of neurodegeneration began as an undergraduate in Stephen Strittmatter's lab at Yale, where his work on the Nogo receptor in Alzheimer's disease led to two papers in the Journal of Neuroscience. Returning to the lab during medical school, he helped identify cellular prion protein (PrPC) as a high-affinity receptor for oligomeric beta-amyloid — work published in Nature and the Journal of Neuroscience that was recognized with Yale's award for the most outstanding medical school thesis in his graduating class. That line of research has since led to multiple promising Alzheimer's disease therapeutics, one of which is currently in human clinical trials.
Splitting his time between the bench and the operating room, Dr. Gimbel now leads a research program at Emory asking whether that same PrPC–amyloid signaling pathway also drives long-term brain injury after head trauma, in continued collaboration with the Strittmatter Lab at Yale. He is also a former site PI for a DOD-funded clinical trial of systemic hypothermia in acute cervical spinal cord injury, and maintains a clinical interest in acute spinal cord injury and neurotrauma care at Grady. He has been recognized with the Emory at Grady Advocacy Award, and he has been nominated for the Congress of Neurological Surgeons Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Impact Award and the AOA Volunteer Clinical Faculty Award at Morehouse School of Medicine.
Correspondence: david.adam.gimbel@emory.edu
For questions about the lab's research, collaborations, or the manuscript currently under review.