Sheila Marie Fleming, PhD, performed her graduate work with Dr. Tim Schallert at the University of Texas at Austin using a toxin model of Parkinson’s disease (PD) to test potential neuroprotective strategies. From there she moved to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Department of Neurology to work with Dr. Marie-Françoise Chesselet, where Dr. Fleming began to study and characterize novel genetic models of PD. At UCLA she studied both motor and non-motor impairments associated with PD, primarily in an alpha-synuclein overexpressing model. She helped to establish multiple pre-clinical drug trials using the alpha-synuclein model.

Dr. Fleming is currently an assistant professor in the Departments of Psychology and Neurology at the University of Cincinnati. There she is continuing her work testing potential therapeutics in alpha-synuclein models and recently created a novel model to study the interaction between two genetic loci associated with PD (ATP13A2 and alpha-synuclein).