Maria Ioannou - Global Excellence Initiative

Neuroscientist Maria Ioannou, assistant professor in the Dept. of Physiology at the University of Alberta, has been awarded a 2021 Sloan Fellowship for her innovative work in lipid biology. Dr. Ioannou’s research focuses on the cellular function of lipids – a group of biological molecules such as fats, oils and waxes – and their role in the central nervous system.

“We’re looking at how this influences cell health in pathology,” she says.

“So we started looking at stroke and now we’re starting to look at Alzheimer’s disease and I think that this is going to apply to a wide variety of neurodegenerative disorders.”

The Ioannou Lab at the university uses a combination of biochemistry and quantitative microscopy to study the mechanisms of lipid transport and metabolism in the brain.

“When neurons get really stressed out they seem to generate a lot of excess lipids and that can be very toxic to them. So because they don’t have the capacity to deal with that themselves they then unload it onto another cell type,” Ioannou says. “I think we’re really going to try to home in on the mechanisms of how this transfer process happens and try to see if there’s any drugs that could be used or pathways that can be targeted to modulate it. For instance, if we could help prevent some cell death maybe we could try to apply that to animal models of disease.”

Dr. Ioannou’s projects are driven entirely by the cell biology and what’s unknown about the cell biology. “I think we need to keep pushing on how important that is. I think it’s that strategy that makes my research so applicable to such a wide range of diseases.”