Scott grew up in Virginia and South Carolina and received his undergraduate degree from Davidson College, concentrating in History and English. After working for several years as a chemist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, he went on to earn his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Emory University in 2000. He studied under Dr. Allan I. Levey in the Department of Neurology to understand the metabolic regulation of presenilin-1, a key protein involved in familial forms of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). 

That same year, he joined Dr. Elliott J. Mufson’s lab at Rush University Medical Center as an Instructor of Neurological Sciences, studying cholinergic mechanisms of AD and its prodromal stage, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), as part of Rush’s NIA-funded Training Program in Age-related Neurodegenerative Disorders. 

Dr. Counts was appointed Assistant Professor of Neurological Sciences at Rush in 2003 based on his expertise in using functional genomic technologies to compare and contrast postmortem brain samples from people who died within the clinical spectrum of no cognitive impairment (NCI) to MCI to AD. In 2013, Dr. Counts was recruited to Michigan State University as an Associate Professor of Translational Neuroscience (primary) and Family Medicine (secondary) at the Grand Rapids campus. His research has been continuously funded since 1998, and he is the author of over 75 papers and book chapters on the molecular pathogenesis of dementia. 

Scott has enjoyed exploring Grand Rapids and western Michigan with his family when not in the lab.

Michigan State University Translational Neuroscience Profile