Postdoctoral Fellow
Natalia joined Alice Lee’s group late in May 2024. Her primary research interests are the role of mobile genomic sequences in normal organismal functioning and disease state with particular focus on brain functioning, development and neurodegenerative processes. Currently, she studies the possible role of transposon activity in aging and Alzheimer’s disease.She earned her Ph.D. in Life sciences from Paris Diderot University in 2018 working with Drs. Nadya Morozova and Annick Harel-Bellan. In her thesis, she developed a network analysis method to predict phenotypically relevant components of the molecular networks based on results of high throughput loss-of-function screening.She got her first postdoctoral experience at the Institut Curie in Paris, France where she worked in the group of Dr. Allison Bardin and the group of Dr. Nicolas Servant. First, she studied local chromatin domains in the intestinal lineage and their remodeling during intestinal stem cell differentiation in D. melanogaster. Later, she started to work with and became fascinated by mobile genomic sequences. She identified the first somatically active “hot” donor locus of endogenous retroviral element active in a tissue-specific manner in D. melanogaster and showed that its activity is modulated by the upstream genomic locus in collaboration with Dr. Katarzyna (Kasia) Siudeja. She decided to pursue her second postdoctoral training to switch her focus from model organisms to the human brain as, besides making us who we are, it is one of the few human organs some cell types of which tolerate relatively high somatic retrotransposon activity. She believes that we are just beginning to understand the functional impact of their multi-layered activity and their possible role in physiological brain functions.In her free time, she enjoys running, visiting art and paleontology museums, and a good book!