John Paul Spence, PhD

Dr. Spence is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM) in Indianapolis, Indiana. He graduated with a BS in biology at Indiana University (Bloomington), and he earned his PhD in Medical Neuroscience at IUPUI in 2010. His research has focused on understanding the underlying causes of Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), social learning deficits in Neurofibromatosis type 1, and Alzheimer’s Disease. He also gained postdoctoral experience in Molecular Pharmacology at Purdue University. In 2015, he joined the Independent Investigator Incubator (I³) program where he is a Grant Writing Mentor and the Program Manager. The I³ is a mentoring program for early career faculty which is supported by IUSM and is affiliated with the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI). In 2018, he played a lead role in developing an intensive grant writing workshop that employs a learn-by-doing approach combined with hands on support. In 2021, Dr. Spence joined the Research Education Component (REC) of the Indiana Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (IADRC). His role is to assist REC scholars with grant development and writing. His overarching goal is to support the development of new translational researchers in academic medicine.