Personnel

Raúl A. García-Rosario was born and raised in Carolina, Puerto Rico. In 2020, he graduated with a B.Sc in Cellular-Molecular Biology from the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras. During his undergraduate career, he developed an interest in neuroscience research/neurology and decided to pursue an MD-PhD. From 2020 to 2022, Raul was a Postbaccalaureate IRTA Research Fellow at the National Institute on Aging in the Laboratory of Behavioral Neuroscience (Neurocognitive Aging Section), where he studied the neuroadaptations underlying memory resilience in aging. His clinical experience identified the immediate need for the translation of basic research findings into therapeutics. As a physician-scientist, Raul hopes to accelerate this translation by conducting research with a more direct emphasis on patient needs. Currently, Raul is a third year MD-PhD student pursuing his PhD in Neuroscience in the Strittmatter lab where he investigates the pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s Disease. Raul's research interests include neuroregeneration, neurodegenerative diseases, neurocognitive aging, learning, memory, cognition, and behavioral neuroscience.

Denethi is a PhD student affiliated with the Department of Neuroscience and Genetics. She earned her bachelor's degree from The Ohio State University in 2019. She then joined Dr. Pallavi Gopal's lab at Yale where her research uncovered complex interactions between TDP-43 and Ataxin-2, RNA-binding proteins implicated in ALS. She found that Ataxin-2 polyQ expansions aberrantly sequester TDP-43, disrupt dynamic properties, perturb transport of TDP-43 ribonucleoprotein (RNP) condensates along axons and increase the propensity for pathologic transformation within RNA-protein assemblies. She discovered that translation was suppressed in neurons expressing polyQ expansions providing mechanistic insights into the distal axonopathy associated with neurodegeneration leading to the conclusion that Ataxin-2 polyQ expansions have detrimental effects on stability, localization, and translation of transcripts critical for axonal and cytoskeletal integrity. Currently, as a graduate student in Dr. Junjie Guo's lab, she is developing organoid and stem cell models of neurodegeneration. She aims to identify RNA risk factors that may unify age-related neurodegenerative diseases. Working with Suzhou Yang, they discovered the mechanism by which an intronic nucleotide repeat expansion (NRE) in the C9ORF72 gene may encode toxic dipeptide repeat proteins in ALS and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Outside of the lab, Denethi is an avid table tennis player, skier, salsa dancer and painter. She also enjoys mentoring undergraduate and postgraduate students.