Jackson Laboratory team set for “Longest Day” workout Friday to benefit Alzheimer’s disease research

Bar Harbor, Maine - Jackson Laboratory Assistant Professor Gareth Howell, Ph.D., and the people in his lab work long days investigating the genetic basis of Alzheimer’s disease. But on Friday, June 21, the Howell lab turns into The Jackson 8 and will be working out all day—the longest day of the year—to raise money for Alzheimer’s research.

The Longest Day event, organized by the Alzheimer’s Association, challenges teams across the nation to work out from sunrise to sunset. “Our team will perform activities all day including hiking, biking and kayaking,” Howell says.

The Jackson 8 will start at sunrise atop Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park, the highest point on the East Coast in the northern hemisphere and thus the site of the earliest sunrise in the U.S. “So,” Howell notes, “our team will kick off the whole event around the nation!”

Howell will be joined by Research Scientist, Ileana Soto Ph.D., Research Assistants Harriet Jackson and Sam Groh, predoctoral student Leah Graham, co-op student Greg Sousa, summer student Jake Radell and Keith Funkhauser, resident assistant for The Jackson Laboratory’s Summer Student Program.

“As a lab studying Alzheimer's disease,” Howell says, “our day job is to try and increase our understanding of the disease to help develop better treatments, and find a cure. However, Alzheimer's disease touches many either directly or indirectly, and so we are all highly motivated to help fight this terrible disease in any way we can.”

According to the National Institute of Aging, Alzheimer’s disease is an irreversible, progressive brain disease that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills, and eventually even the ability to carry out the simplest tasks. In most people with Alzheimer’s, symptoms first appear after age 60. Estimates vary, but experts suggest that as many as 5.1 million Americans may have Alzheimer’s disease.

Donations to The Jackson 8 for The Longest Day event may be made online at https://thelongestday.alz.org/home/team/94765.

The Jackson Laboratory, founded in 1929, is an independent, nonprofit biomedical research institution based in Bar Harbor, Maine, with a facility in Sacramento, Calif., and a new genomic medicine institute in Farmington, Conn. It employs a total staff of more than 1,450. Its mission is to discover precise genomic solutions for disease and empower the global biomedical community in the shared quest to improve human health.