Name:
Makis Tzioras
Job Title:
PhD student
Place of work / study:
The University of Edinburgh, UK Dementia Research Institute
Area of research:
Alzheimer’s disease / Microglia and Synapse Loss
How is your work currently funded:
UK Dementia Research Institute, Alzheimer’s Research UK
Tell us a little about yourself:
I originally come from Athens, Greece but moved to Edinburgh when I was 17 to study Biomedical Sciences. Since then, Scotland has become a second home and I feel very grateful to be doing my PhD with a wonderful supervisor, Tara Spires-Jones. In my PhD, I am very lucky to be working with human post-mortem tissue where I am investigating how microglial cells go awry and study their contribution to synapse loss in Alzheimer’s disease.
Tell us a fun fact about yourself:
I think I subconsciously ended-up working on microglia eating synapses to satisfy an ancestral trait of eating culture due to my Greek-Jewish background. Also, my drag alter-ego is Princess Glea.
Why did you choose to work in dementia?
During my undergraduate degree, I was fascinated by the concept of memory, and how it’s a common process in everyone, yet so different between people. From a scientific perspective, I was then curious to understand how memory is lost in dementia which led me to work on Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia. Since then, I took a particular interest in how the immune system is involved in maintaining brain health but can also contribute to disease pathogenesis.