Gianna Fote,
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Affiliation(s):
UC Irvine School of Medicine
ORCID URL:
Areas of Interest:
Neuronal autophagy-lysosomal mechanism, lipid biology
Biography & Research:
Gianna Fote’s long-term research goal is to define mechanisms of neurological disease and identify novel therapies. Her first research project in high school was studying the life cycle Aplysia californica, a model organism in foundational studies of learning and behavior. As an undergraduate at Yale University she joined the molecular psychiatry lab of Professor Marina Picciotto and worked for 3.5 years, including full time during two summer fellowships, defining the effect of cholinergic tone on depression and anxiety- like behavior. While at Yale, she served as President of the Yale Undergraduate Society for the Biological Sciences, Yale College Freshman Counsellor, and Captain of the club women’s water polo team. Following her graduation with a BS in Intensive Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, she matriculated to the MD/PhD program at UCI. During her first two years of medical school she remained active in research, leading a project on the dysregulation of sphingomyelins in blood plasma in Alzheimer’s disease patients, and joined a multidisciplinary team of neurologists, engineers, and biologists to study the incidence and risks of head impacts in water polo. For her thesis work she joined the laboratories of Professor Joan S. Steffan and Leslie M. Thompson to study autophagy in neurodegenerative disease, and in this issue describes how the Alzheimer’s disease-related protein APOE can be degraded by of autophagy. During graduate school, Dr. Fote received several fellowships including an NRSA F30 award from the NIA, the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists fellowship, and the Lorna Carlin Scholarship. Her honors include invited speaker at Gordon Autophagy Conference, and best poster at Gordon Research Conference for Trinucleotide Repeat Disorders and the UCI Remind Symposium. Dr. Fote defended her PhD thesis in April 2021, entitled “Interaction of Huntingtin and Apolipoprotein E with the endolysosomal system and autophagy”, and is now completing her clinical rotations as part of the MD/PhD program at UCI. She will apply to research-focused residencies in 2022.
