Crystal Wise
Sid O’Bryant, a Cajun by birth who grew up playing in the swamps, says as a youngster he wanted to be to be a craw fisherman in Pierre Part, Louisiana.
“I’m a long way away from that,” he jokes today in a phone call last month.
O’Bryant, a first-generation college graduate and a member of Fort Worth Inc.’s The 400 in 2022, is the executive director of the Institute for Translational Research at The University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth.
He watched as he could do little to help his grandmother navigate the perils of the insidious Alzheimer’s disease.
“Hopefully, I can help other people’s grandmothers,” he says.
In October, he was a newsmaker.
The university announced the institute had been awarded a five-year grant of up to $148 million from the National Institutes of Health. The funding will go to one of the largest studies ever of Alzheimer’s disease within a health disparities framework seeking to understand the differences in the disease among multiethnic populations.
The examination is being led by O’Bryant, who has an undergraduate degree from Louisiana State and graduate degrees, including a Ph.D. in neuropsychology from the University of Albany in New York.
With this grant, $210 million has now been invested in the study, O’Bryant says.
“It’s a big thing for the study,” O’Bryant says of the $148 million commitment. “What it does is it continues the work, but also expands the work. One of the things it allows us is to study the life course from a better perspective. We’re now seeing people all the way down to 30 and above. It was 50 and above.
“One of the goals of this study is to follow this cohort for 20, 30, 40 years, so we can study the earliest signs of brain changes that are causing memory loss and better treat and even prevent those things.”