PhD congratulations to Dr Andrea Salzinger
Jan 2025: Many congratulations to Dr Andrea Salzinger who has successfully completed her PhD.
For her PhD research, Andrea studied how particular synapses, the neuromuscular junctions, degenerate in motor neuron disease (MND). Neuromuscular junctions are connections that join the nerve cells to muscle cells. Andrea generated three-dimensional "human neuromuscular junctions in a dish" from human stem cells that were generated from patient-donated blood samples. The nerve and muscle cells live and grow in petri dishes, and they accurately model the neuromuscular junction by connecting motor neurons with skeletal muscle. This provides an excellent system to enable researchers to study what happens at neuromuscular junctions and what goes wrong in MND.
For her PhD studies, Andrea was supervised by Dr Bhuvaneish Selvaraj and Prof Siddharthan Chandran. She was supported by the SAND-ITN (Secretion and Autophagy in Neurodegenerative Diseases), an international Marie Skłodowska-Curie training programme supported by the European Union. As part of her training programme Andrea had the opportunity to collaborate internationally, participate in high quality training events, and to spend some time in the lab of Prof. Hemali Phatnani’s at the New York Genome Center.
Andrea now plans to continue her research as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Prof. Brian Wainger at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard, USA. We would like to wish Andrea every success with her future career!
Related links
Stem cell research at the Anne Rowling Clinic
Secretion and Autophagy in Neurodegenerative Diseases programme website (University of Oslo, Norway)