Post-doctoral fellowship in Vascular Cognitive Impairment & Dementia

Lindsay M. De Biase, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She received her B.S in Cellular, Molecular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University in 2003. Upon graduation, she worked as a research assistant with Drs. Eric Hoffman and Robert Frieshtat at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington D.C. investigating gene expression changes associated with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and acute lung injury. Dr. De Biase then entered the Neuroscience Graduate Program at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine where she earned her Ph.D. working with Dr. Dwight Bergles on synaptic signaling from neurons to oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs). During her thesis work, Dr. De Biase developed novel approaches for electrophysiological analysis of neuron-OPC synapses and discovered that OPC synaptic connectivity varies across brain regions and is rapidly lost as the cells mature into oligodendrocytes, consistent with the hypothesis that this signaling acts as a brake on OPC differentiation. Dr. De Biase then completed postdoctoral training with Dr. Antonello Bonci at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, where she discovered that microglia in distinct basal ganglia nuclei exhibit regionally-specialized phenotypes, overturning the widespread belief that these cells are equivalent throughout the CNS. Her work also provided evidence that local regulatory cues play a critical role in shaping microglial diversity. She joined UCLA's faculty in the fall of 2018.