“From a research perspective, working at an institution at Yale, which has such amazing resources and such a diverse group of researchers with differing expertise, has made me appreciate being in a collaborative, academic environment,” Leah said.
Together, these experiences oriented Leah towards staying in academia following graduate school.
Leah hails from Ipswich, a small coastal town outside of Boston, Massachusetts. A town full of nature preserves, coupled with being near the biotech hub of Boston, ingrained science into Leah’s upbringing. Two lab internships in the summers added to her extroverted personality and fascination with people, and she then went on to study Neuroscience and Behavior at University of Notre Dame. For Leah, neuroscience is “a way to understand humanity.” She was eventually drawn to neurodegeneration and brain aging for its complexity and devastating consequences.
While her grandfather was battling Alzheimer’s Disease, Leah firsthand saw how neurodegenerative diseases strip people of their identities and “place huge burdens on caregivers and society as a whole”. At Notre Dame, she completed a senior thesis on neural dedifferentiation — where the specialized neural cells revert back to a less specialized state — and went on to work at Harvard Medical School for a summer studying the role of epigenetic noise in brain aging — random fluctuations in the epigenetic marks that occur in the brain over time and contribute to the aging process of the brain. After deciding to continue conducting similar research in graduate school, Leah was attracted to Yale’s collaborative neuroscience community, labs that do “stellar work” in neurodegeneration, and the warmth that the INP students exuded.
In the Chandra Lab, Leah studies molecular and cellular mechanisms of Parkinson's Disease at the synapse. This includes looking at endocytosis — a cellular process in which cells engulf external materials or substances — and recycling of the dopamine transporter in Parkinson’s Disease models, as well as characterizing a novel phosphorylation (a biochemical process in which a phosphate group is added to a molecule) site on a-synuclein (a protein that plays a role in regulating synaptic function). She hopes to work simultaneously on both her a-synuclein and DAT (dopamine transporter) projects and write a thesis about these two sides of the Parkinson’s coin — a-synuclein aggregation and dopaminergic neuron vulnerability.