Francesca Garretti

Dr. Francesca Garretti is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Alison Goate in the Loeb Center for Alzheimer’s disease at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. Her research focuses on investigating the effects of genetic risk factors associated with Alzheimer’s disease on induced pluripotent stem cell derived microglia function. She completed her PhD in Pathobiology and Molecular Medicine at Columbia University where she was co-mentored by Dr. David Sulzer and Dr. Dritan Agalliu. During her PhD, she uncovered alpha-synuclein autoimmunity driven by T cells and specific immune alleles in Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients. In addition, she modeled alpha-synuclein autoimmunity in mice to show that it is a driver for enteric inflammation and neurodegeneration and prodromal symptoms of PD. She received her BSc with honours in Biochemistry from the University of St. Andrews, UK and MSc in Biomedical Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Francesca has co-authored 8 peer-reviewed publications that have been cited over 800 times and has given numerous invited talks and seminars. She currently holds an F32 Kirschstein-NRSA fellowship from the National Institute of Aging.