Manel Boussouf successfully defends her Master’s thesis at EPFL Switzerland. Manel completed her dissertation work in our group, entitled “Microbiome Impact on Neuro-Immmune and Neurodegenerative Processes in Parkinson’s Disease Patients.” Congratulations Manel!
An NIH R21 grant has been awarded to Joanna (Asia) Korecka, in Instructor in the Division and Lab. Dr Laurie Cox, an Assistant Professor of Neurology, is co-PI. The grant is entitled, “Investigating how the microbiota modulates neuroinflammatory signaling and neurodegeneration in Parkinson’s disease and dementia.” The work builds from a very exciting study our lab is spearheading with collaborators in Spain to identify the cause of variable penetrance in a family harboring a dominant alpha-synuclein mutation. Congratulations, Asia and Laurie!!!
Congratulations to Erinc Hallacli on his magnum opus finally seeing the light of day! In this paper, we find a surprising new function for alpha-synuclein in mRNA degradation/stability. Read about it on our Publications and Media pages.
Ashlan Willett, a research assistant in our lab and Division, is accepted at Penn for medical school! Congratulations, Ashlan!
Anastasia Kuzkina will be beginning in our lab in the summer of 2022. At the University of Würzburg, She has done seminal work on seeded amplification assays of alpha-synuclein from skin. The APDA is now supporting her to better understand the consequences of alpha-synuclein strains in human stem-cell models generated in our lab. Thank you APDA and congratulations, Anastasia!!!
Dr Xinyuan Wang is awarded NIH T32 training grant for her proposed work on interrogating the function of the retromer in PD iPSC models. Congratulations!
Charlotte Oettgen has chosen the RN path and has been accepted at the MGH Institute of Health Professions – congratulations, Charlotte!
Dina Zielinski completed her Ph.D. project, co-mentored by Vik and earlier by Yaniv Erlich. She successfully defended her thesis earlier this month. Her thesis was entitled “Rare variant analysis in neurodegenerative disorders guided by cellular models of proteotoxicity.” Congratulations, Dr Zielinski!
Congratulations Zoe!!! Very proud of your work here and looking forward to great things from you in the years ahead. UCSD is lucky to poach you from the East Coast :)
$9M ASAP (Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s) grant
The Khurana lab and collaborators have been selected to be part of the first cohort of global ASAP teams, funded $161M to to understand how genes and the immune system contribute to developing Parkinson’s. You can read about this grant here, here and here.
The Ken Griffin prize will see us working with colleagues at MGH to seek an elusive diagnostic for Parkinson’s and related disorders, namely a radiotracer tool to image the protein that aggregates in the brain of patients, alpha-synuclein.
Finally, an NIH R01 will fund the Khurana lab and a team of international collaborators tofurther our understanding of alpha-synuclein aggregation in novel human stem cell models of synucleinopathies, including Parkinson’s disease, dementia with Lewy bodies and multiple system atrophy.