neurodegeneration

For those of you that don't speak Spanish, I'm providing a short summary so that you have an idea of what the interview that we cover today is about.

We interviewed Dr. Agustina Alaimo, who's a neurobiologist whose career has consistently focused on understudied cellular players in neurodegeneration.

Agustina trained across career stages at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, where she had an undergraduate mentor that led her to pursue a PhD in neurobiology.

Her PhD work focused on studying how exposure to manganese, which is common in metal workers in Argentina, leads to neurodegeneration.

She found that manganese profoundly disrupts astrocytes through mitochondrial-dependent cell death pathways, and that antioxidants like melatonin can preemptively protect these astrocytes.

After her postdoctoral research, she attended a conference talk that steered her in the direction of studying the retina, specifically the retinal pigment epithelium, which is a cellular barrier which is critical in age-related macular degeneration.