Maria Teresa Ferretti PhD

Maria Teresa is Group Leader at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine (IREM) of University of Zurich and Zurich Neuroscience Center (Switzerland), heading the ‘Immunology of Neurodegeneration’ team. She is a neuroscientist and neuroimmunologist, with more than 10-year international experience in the field of Alzheimer’s disease. Her main research interest is elucidating the role of the innate and adaptive immune system in the progression of Alzheimer’s pathology, using both animal models and clinical samples. She obtained her master in Pharmaceutical Chemistry in 2005 (University of Cagliari, Italy). After a stage at the Neurochemistry Center of Excellence for Drug Discovery of GlaxoSmith&Kline (Harlow, England), she decided to pursue a career in neuroscience research and accepted a position as a PhD student in the laboratory of Dr Claudio Cuello (McGill University, Montreal, Canada) in 2006.

She completed her doctoral studies at the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics in 2011, with a thesis entitled ‘The role of inflammation in early stages of Alzheimer’s disease’. Since 2011 she is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Prof. Roger Nitsch (University of Zurich, Switzerland), and as of 2013 she has been leading a small research group dedicated to the study of the immunological underpinnings of Alzheimer’s disease pathology. Maria Teresa has received several fellowships, awards and prices, including a prestigious ‘merit scholarship for foreign students’ from the FRNQ (PBEEE program, Quebec, Canada) and a 3-year research grant from the Synapsis Foundation (Swiss Alzheimer Association). Her results, published by several, peer-reviewed scientific journals, have been covered by the online platform Alzforum and the local press (the Sonntagszeitung and the ZNZ Gazette).

She serves as ad-hoc reviewer for several journals, including ‘PLOS-one’, ‘Brain Behaviour and Immunity’ and ‘Neurodegenerative Diseases’ and has worked as grant reviewer for the Israel Science Foundation. In August 2016 Maria Teresa co-founded the ‘Women’s Brain Project’, a non-profit organization aimed at increasing awareness and research about brain sexual dimorphism and its possible implications in brain and mental diseases.