Anna Gillespie is an assistant professor at the University of Washington. She earned her B.S. in biology from Stanford University in 2010, and received her Ph.D. in biomedical sciences from UCSF in 2015. During her graduate work in Yadong Huang’s lab at the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease, Gillespie identified abnormalities in hippocampal network activity caused by apolipoprotein E4, the major genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. She completed her postdoctoral training as a Simons Fellow in the lab of Loren Frank at UCSF, where she gained experience with in vivo electrophysiology, developed memory-dependent tasks for rats, and contributed to computational approaches for neural data analysis. The Gillespie lab will combine these approaches to study how the neural mechanisms underlying memory processes degrade over the course of healthy aging and in the context of neurodegenerative disease and to develop novel interventional tools to preserve cognitive ability over the lifespan.
SCPAB Project:
Linking molecules, circuits and behavior to promote plasticity and memory in the aging brain