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Andrea Liatis |
Andrea Liatis was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and was raised all over the globe. She lived in Argentina, the United States, and Venezuela, and finished up highschool in the Philippines. After all the traveling she finally settled down in Atlanta, GA, where she decided to attend Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her Bachelor’s of Science in August 2003 in the Biological Sciences from Georgia Tech, graduating with highest honors. That same month she joined the Emory Neuroscience graduate program to begin her journey towards her PhD. As an undergraduate, Andrea worked in research labs focusing in ecology and organic chemistry. During the summer of 2002, she was awarded a Howard Hughes Research Internship, and worked on a project that studied the behavior, ecology and physics of copepods and marine krill. Her internship ended in the spring of 2003, where she presented her first poster, ‘Mechanoreception in Krill Antennae’ during a Howard Hughes Interns Meeting. In the spring of 2003 during her junior year of college, she was awarded the John H. Ridley Scholarship Award, which is given annually to a junior with outstanding scholastic achievement and an interest in research. In addition to this award, she was also named and recognized as one of seven outstanding women at Georgia Tech, to be featured in a special brochure used to recruit more females to the university. Finally, in her graduating summer semester at GA Tech, she was named as the first recipient of the James Robinson III Fellowship. She worked in Dr. Julia Kubanek’s lab, using organic chemistry techniques, such as gas chromatography, thin layer chromatography, distillation and crystallization, to isolate and classify a chemical defense compound from a marine sponge, and consequently used molecular biology techniques, including mRNA isolation and Northern blots, to begin to isolate the receptor in predatory fish that recognized this compound.
It was during her junior year in college, however, that Andrea’s interests began to shift into neuroscience and psychology. After being accepted into Emory’s neuroscience program, she took part in a summer rotation in Dr. Elaine Walker’s lab, in the Department of Psychology. It was there that she got her first experience working with a clinical research project that studied patients suffering from mental illness. Specifically, the study involved examining neurodevelopmental aspects of schizophrenia in adolescent children, as well as the role stress played in the disease. Among her accomplishments, she was trained to administer neurocognitive tests to troubled adolescents, improved a protocol used to trace and analyze hippocampal volume from fMRI brain imaging slices, and was an author on an abstract presented at the SRP Meeting. The title of the abstract reads, ‘Neuroendocrine reactivity in subjects undergoing MRI: Does heightened cortisol impact our results?’
At this point she became very interested in the role that early life stress plays in mental disorders. Through personal experiences and by reading the literature, she had come to discover that stress and mental disorders can affect many aspects of a biological system, and became interested in how the immune and nervous system interact in the context of behavioral disorders. To this end, Andrea decided to pursue her doctoral thesis work in the laboratory of Dr. Andrew Miller. Andrea’s current research interests involve better understanding of the interactions that occur between the nervous and immune systems. More specifically, while much is known about the interplay between the endocrine system (as exemplified by the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis) and the immune system, relatively little is known about the role of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) in immune responses relevant to health and illness. Various lines of evidence indicate that people with major depression have both HPA axis and SNS dysfunction, which may be related to past and/or current exposure to stress. Moreover, the SNS has been shown to activate innate immune responses in rodents. Depressed patients are known to suffer from a variety of ailments (medical comorbidities including cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer), which may involve excessive activity of the innate immune system. Therefore, increased activation of the SNS as a function of stress/depression may play a role. Because of this possibility, she decided she wanted to study the role of the sympathetic nervous system in regard to stress effects on immunity. She is now exploring the cellular and signal transduction mechanisms involved in these systems as well as pharmacological approaches to reversing observed effects, using a non-human primate animal model of early life stress. In addition, she would ultimately like to explore the relationship of SNS-immune interactions as they relate to health, including cardiovascular disease and cancer. |
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