Serrano Geidy E

In 2006 Dr. Geidy Serrano completed a doctoral degree in Anatomy at the University of Puerto Rico, Medical Science Campus. Her graduate studies in the laboratory of Dr. Mark Miller involved the characterization of a bilateral pair of motor neurons in the feeding system of Aplysia californica. She studies how these neurons control pharyngeal movements that contribute to the model consummatory behaviors and tried to understand co-neurotransmission and neuromodulation of conditional rhythmicity and synchrony of motor activity. While pursuing her doctoral degree, she received the Minority in Neuroscience Fellowship from the Society of Neuroscience and had the honor to do an Internship at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Whole, MA. In 2007 she did a postdoctoral appointment at Emory University’s School of Medicine and received a National Research Service Award Training Grant (F32-NINDS). Her worked primarily focus in understanding the molecular basis of neuron-degeneration and neuroinflammation at the hippocampus after status epilepticus. After three years of postdoctoral training, she joined the Brain and Body Donation program at Banner Sun Health Research Institute (BSHRI), Arizona and has been supervising all laboratory operations in the BBDP for 12 years. Dr. Serrano assumed the directorship of the Civin Laboratory for Neuropathology at BSHRI in 2020. She is Co-Director of the Neuropathology Core of the National Institute on Aging Arizona Alzheimer’s Disease Core Center (ADCC) and helped lead the Central Pathology Laboratory for Avid Radiopharmaceuticals’ Phase III AV-45 amyloid (florbetapir) and AV-1451 (flortaucipir) FDA-licensing tau imaging studies, as well as Navidea Biopharmaceuticals’ Phase III PET trial of NAV4694. Her work allows her to contribute to brain and biospecimen research that pursues the understanding of neurological disorders around the world. She had contributed to over one hundred publications. Some of the work that she led includes studies in neurodegeneration synaptic loss of aging in humans and sex differences. Other relevant work includes an unbiased study exploring wide transcriptomics modifications in isolated whole human brain cells in progressive supranuclear palsy and other neurodegenerative disorders common in aging and most recently she also studied the presence of SARS-CoV-2 genomic in human organs and its possible effects on histopathology, gene expression and immune response in brains and organs from subjects that died of COVID-19.