Lezanne Ooi
Australian neuroscientist and academic
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Early life and education
Ooi trained in the United Kingdom. She studied biochemistry at the University of York, where she worked with GlaxoSmith Kline. When Ooi was studying neuroscience, her grandmother was diagnosed with dementia, which motivated her to purse a career studying neurodegenerative disease. She completed her doctoral research on the transcriptional repressor REST (Repressor Element 1-Silencing Transcription factor) at the University of Leeds. She remained there as a postdoctoral researcher, where she studied cardiac hypertrophy and developed cellular imaging techniques to understand neuronal function. Her research showed that atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) and B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP) became abnormally high in people with hypertrophy, and that an increase in REST could halt the rise of the other proteins.
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Research and career
In 2012, Ooi joined the University of Wollongong as a professor of neuroscience. Her lab has characterised over 100 induced pluripotent stem cell lines. She has studied various neurological conditions, including motor neuron diseases and vanishing white matter disease, a form of leukodystrophy. She studied how COVID-19 impacted the likelihood of contracting dementia.
In 2022, Ooi was awarded funding from the Michael J. Fox Foundation to study Parkinson's disease. Her research considers the neuronal changes that place during neurodegenerative disease. She believes that Parkinson's causes changes in cell lipids and metabolites; which could be used as biomarkers of disease.