Adele Bubnys Email & Phone Number

Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

Working to develop gene editing therapies for neurological disorders

Cambridge, Massachusetts

I worked with a team to develop the miBrain, a fully integrated, human iPS-derived brain tissue model inclusive of a blood-brain barrier, myelination, and neuroimmune component. We have harnessed this platform to identify novel mechanisms of neurodegeneration in APOE4 carriers.

Greater New York City Area

For my doctoral dissertation, I used three different approaches to study the role of generalized arousal (GA) in driving and modulating mammalian motor activity: computational modeling of GA circuits, in vitro culture of a reticulospinal circuit, and in vivo behavioral assays of circadian transitions in GA.I constructed a variety of computational models of the generalized arousal circuit and asked how modifying specific aspects of the hindbrain medullary nucleus gigantocellularis (NGC) and its connectivity would influence the responsiveness of motor effectors in the circuit to arousing sensory stimuli. I then chose to focus specifically on hindbrain Chx10+ neurons, a population of spinally projecting neurons localized to the NGC, and developed an in vitro system to culturethese neurons both as an isolated population and together with spinal motor neurons. This work is described in my first author publication at Frontiers in Neuroscience "Hindbrain V2a Neurons Pattern Rhythmic Activity of Motor Neurons in a Reticulospinal Coculture".As these two studies have demonstrated the intimate link between GA and motor output, I then used an in vivo behavioral assay of voluntary motor activity to study the dynamics of circadian transition in arousal levels in mice. I found that despite the intrinsic noisiness and variability of mouse behavior, these transitions follow a remarkably lawful sigmoidal curve that could be robustly fit to a logistic equation with only three parameters and shows time reversibility between the low-to-high and high-to-low arousal transitions. In addition to demonstrating how complex behavior can be reduced to a relatively simple mathematical form, this new curve fitting paradigm allowed me and others in the lab to quantify how different behavioral conditions affect arousal transitions in greater detail than ever before.

Doctor Of Philosophy - Phd, Biomedical Sciences, General

Bachelor Of Arts - Ba, Biochemistry And Molecular Biology