Magdalini Polymenidou PhD

Magdalini is originally Greek and she studied Pharmacy at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She did her PhD on prion diseases at the University Hospital of Zurich. In her thesis work she studied the efficacy of experimental prion immunotherapies, and defined a novel molecular classification for human prion diseases. Since 2008 she is studying amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD).

During her postdoctoral studies at the University of California in San Diego, she used genome-wide approaches to understand the function of TDP-43 and FUS, two RNA-binding proteins that are associated with ALS and FTD. Her work established wide and diverse roles of the two proteins in RNA processing within the nervous system, and determined TDP-43 and FUS RNA targets that are altered in disease. Since September 2013, she is an SNSF Assistant Professor, with a double appointment between the Faculty of Science and the Medical Faculty of the University of Zurich.

She is also coordinator of the Gender Equality Committee of the Neuroscience Center Zurich. When not in the lab, Magdalini enjoys playing with her son Lennart, who was born in San Diego in September 2012.