Dr. Lena Burbulla is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology at Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine, in Chicago. She received her MSc in Biology from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich in 2007 and earned a PhD in Neurobiology in 2011 from the Eberhard-Karls-University in Tübingen, Germany. Dr. Burbulla then pursued a postdoctoral position in the laboratory of Dimitri Krainc at MGH, Harvard Medical School, in Boston in 2012 and followed Dr. Krainc’s team to Chicago in 2013, where she continued her research at Northwestern University.
Dr. Burbulla’s research focus is to define key molecular pathways in the pathogenesis of neurodegeneration by studying rare genetic diseases with a goal of identifying converging pathways and specific targets for therapeutic development. Using genetic Parkinson’s disease as a model, the overall objective of her work is to evaluate disease mechanisms in specific subtypes of human neurons in an age-dependent manner. Her work has been published in several scientific journals.