Aarhus University

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Marina Romero-Ramos, Ph.D. (Vice-coordinator)


Dept. of Biomedicine, Health Faculty
Hoegh-Guldbergsgade 10, bldg. 1115, office 120
Aarhus University
DK-8000C Aarhus
Denmark


ORCID: 0000-0003-0970-578X
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Marina Romero-Ramos, was awarded her PhD degree in 2000 at the University of Seville (Spain) with a project focused on the role of antioxidants in the dopaminergic system developed at the Department of Biochem. and Mol. Biology. She later moved to the USA to work under the supervision of Prof. Marie-Francoise Chesselet, at the UCLA School of Medicine. There, her post-doctoral studies focused on the use of non-neural stem cells for neural replacement.

She became a Marie Curie Fellow in 2002 and for the following three years developed and characterized pre-clinical models of Parkinson's disease (PD) based on the use of viral vectors to overexpress α-synuclein in brain, in collaboration with Profs. Deniz Kirik, and Anders Bjorklund at Lund University, Sweden. In 2006, she became a faculty member at the Health Faculty, Aarhus University, Denmark, where she funded her own research team, which works on understanding the different aspects associated with the α-synuclein-neurodegenerative process in PD. In 2023 she was appointed Full Professor in Neuroscience.

MRR's team has been investigating early changes in α-synuclein induced neurodegeneration and PD modelling using α-synuclein based strategies from viral vectors mediated models to the most novel ones using injections of fibrillar α-synuclein. They have help characterizing those models using motor behaviour, PET imaging (in collaboration with the Clinical Dept) and postmortem histology and show how motor defects, immune activation and synaptic changes precede neuronal death. In parallel, during the last decade they have put a big effort to characterize the immune response and its role in the disease progression with relation to α-synuclein. In this regard the MRR lab have studied not only microglia response, but also peripheral immune cells involved in both, the adaptive and the innate immune response. To do so the lab works both with rodents PD model, but also, they collaborate closely with clinicians and investigate immune traits and changes in cohorts of people with PD. For these studies the use single cell techniques such as flow cytometry and single cell RNA sequencing that they correlate with clinical and imaging readouts with the aim of revealing new relevant players in the disease process.

Dr. Romero-Ramos is a member of the Board of directors of the World Parkinson Coalition and the board of the Danish Society for Neuroscience. She is the vice-head of the Neuroscience PhD School at the Health Faculty form Aarhus Univ. Her laboratory is affiliated with the EMBL Node on Translational Neuroscience, the Danish Research Institute of Translational Neuroscience (DANDRITE). Her work is supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Michael J. Fox Foundation, the Danish Parkinson Foundation and the Danish Research Council and she is currently an Ascending Investigator awardee from the The Lundbeck Foundation.