Samira Abdulai-Saiku, Ph.D.

Samira Abdulai-Saiku is assistant professor in the biology department at Temple University. She graduated from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology with a B.S. (with honors) in biochemistry. She then earned her doctorate in biological sciences at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, studying sex differences in behavior sequelae of Toxoplasma gondii-infected rodents.

During her postdoctoral training in the lab of Dena Dubal at the University of California, San Francisco, Abdulai-Saiku developed a keen interest for dissecting the role of the X chromosome on cognitive aging. Specifically, she focused on transgenic mouse models, primary neuronal cell culture techniques and omics data analysis to dissect how the parent-of-X origin contributes to female variability in cognitive aging. Her current work focuses on using single-cell omics approaches, animal cognitive behavioral models and transgenic mouse models to dissect how the parent-of-X origin mediates sex differences in cognitive aging.