You probably heard it in biology class: mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. You memorized it, put it on your test, and moved on. But for Dr. Chad Frasier, associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at East Tennessee State University, that is not the whole story. To Dr. Frasier, mitochondria are not just cellular power plants but dynamic, shape-shifting structures with roles scientists are still uncovering, many of which have only come to light in the past 15 years. They influence how excitable a cell is, how it dies, and potentially, how a traumatic brain injury can lead to epilepsy.
Dr. Frasier began at Central Michigan University, where his research on dopamine receptors and their role in Parkinson’s disease changed the course of his career.
He went on to East Carolina University for his PhD, where an unexpected pivot would define the next decade of his work. Though he arrived with an interest in bipolar disorder, Dr. Frasier found himself drawn to the mitochondria. He joined the lab of Dr. David Brown, who had trained at one of the country’s leading cardiac mitochondria programs, and spent his graduate years studying what happens at the cellular level after a heart attack. Think of it like a pipe bursting in a house: the flood causes damage, but so does the emergency crew rushing in. Dr. Frasier investigated which cellular processes drove that destruction, and that question would follow him for years.
After his PhD, Dr. Frasier completed his postdoctoral training in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Michigan under Dr. Lori Isom, a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. There, his focus shifted toward epilepsy and Dravet Syndrome, a severe genetic epilepsy that typically begins in infancy. His team used induced pluripotent stem cells, reprogramming a patient’s own cells to create functional heart cells in a laboratory dish, to study why patients with Dravet Syndrome face unusually high risk of sudden, unexpected death. The technology allowed them to identify dangerous cardiac arrhythmias in a patient before clinical symptoms appeared.
“I had all this research that I had been doing, and I was seeing it being translated into clinical findings,” Dr. Frasier said. “It was really cool to see the process.”
Dr. Frasier arrived at ETSU in 2018, and collaboration has been central to his lab’s identity from the start. His first major grant examined mitochondrial function in the heart in the context of Dravet Syndrome, work carried out in large part by then-PhD student Jessica Aldridge, who went on to win the outstanding dissertation award and now conducts research at Vanderbilt University. Currently, PhD student Canah McNeal is leading the lab’s newest direction, investigating whether the dynamic behavior of mitochondria plays a role in why some traumatic brain injury patients develop epilepsy.
“My research has always expanded from my own models to collaborating with others,” Dr. Frasier said. “Emphasizing ETSU collaborations is something that’s really important to me.”
Collaborative, outside-the-box thinking is exactly why Dr. Frasier was recruited into traumatic brain injury research in the first place. The field was looking for scientists from outside the traditional epilepsy pipeline to bring fresh perspectives.
“Sometimes scientific fields get siloed into what they think is happening,” he said. “They were trying to bring in outside people to push the field forward.”
That outside perspective is already earning national attention. A paper from Dr. Frasier’s lab on mitochondrial sex differences in a juvenile Dravet Syndrome heart model was recently featured during the keynote address at the American Epilepsy Society Meeting, one of the field’s premier conferences. The keynote speaker personally requested a slide from his paper to display to the entire audience.
For Dr. Frasier, the research is personal. Growing up in the post-9/11 era, he watched friends and family return from war with traumatic brain injuries. That experience never left him, and is part of what drew him to the question he is now chasing in his lab every day: why do some of those injuries become epilepsy, and how do we stop it?
It is a question he does not plan to leave unanswered.
