Clarissa Waites, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology and Cell Biology at Columbia University Medical Center. Her research is focused on understanding how Rab GTPases (protein regulators) mediate the trafficking and degradation (break down) of synaptic and neuronal proteins and how Rab dysfunction is linked to neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr. Waites received her BS in biological sciences from Stanford University in 1995 and her PhD in neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco in 2001. She performed postdoctoral work at Stanford University and has been on the faculty at Columbia since 2011.