Julia Perederiy, PhD, has been striving throughout her career to understand systems-level contributions to neurological disorders. Initially, she focused on patterns of genetic activity during brain development in autism and contributed to two influential publications from Daniel Geschwind’s laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles. Subsequently, during her graduate work with Gary Westbrook at the Vollum Institute in Portland, Oregon, Dr. Perederiy took a systems-level approach to investigating brain repair following an injury that mimics the first stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Her work documented an injury-induced increase in generation and survival of new neurons, which were functionally supported by the injury-induced reorganization of inputs from the surrounding neural network. This work was published on the cover of the March 13, 2013 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience and has been regarded as an important contribution to the field.

Dr. Perederiy’s sustained interests in the clinical applications of her research have led her to obtain a master’s certificate in technology entrepreneurship and to her current position as research and development scientist at Entia Biosciences, where she is investigating chronic disease from a systems perspective in hopes to uncover new and effective treatments and disease prevention strategies.