Eleanna Kara, MD, PhD

Dr. Eleanna Kara is joining the Department of Neurology at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and the Institute for Neurological Therapeutics as a tenure track assistant professor in September 2023. She earned her MD from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, followed by an MSc in Neuroscience and a PhD in Neurogenetics from University College London (UCL) in the United Kingdom under the supervision of Sir Prof. John Hardy and Prof. Henry Houlden. She continued her research training as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital in the lab of Prof. Brad Hyman. Afterwards, she moved to Switzerland where she started her neuropathology residency in Adriano Aguzzi’s lab at the University Hospital Zurich and completed her residency at Queen Square/University College London Hospital. She also completed a clinical fellowship in bone and soft tissue pathology at the Royal National Orthopaedic hospital. Throughout her clinical training, she remained active in basic science research by working as a postdoc in Profs Adriano Aguzzi’s and John Hardy’s labs at the University of Zurich and UCL, respectively. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists (FRCPath) in diagnostic neuropathology, as well as a European Fellow in Neuropathology (EFN). Her postdoctoral research has been funded by long term fellowships from European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP).

Dr. Kara’s research focuses on understanding the pathogenesis of Parkinson’s disease and Dementia with Lewy Bodies, with a particular focus on the mechanisms involved in a-synuclein propagation and formation of inclusions. She recently published a seminal paper on the first genome-wide, high throughput screen for a-synuclein propagation. Her lab uses high throughput screens and -omics and develops genetically encodable tools to study the networks involved in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases (Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases), with the ultimate aim being to develop combination treatments for those devastating diseases.