Marta Olah, PhD

Dr. Olah obtained her masters degree in Neurosciences from Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary. For her PhD she joined the Boddeke lab at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, where she studied the microglia phenotypes associated with brain plasticity and regeneration, in particularly in the context of multiple sclerosis. After receiving her PhD in 2011, she joined the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School as postdoctoral research fellow, where she investigated multiple sclerosis associated pathways in peripheral immune cells, microglia and neural stem cells. In 2014 she was recruited to the De Jager/Bradshaw lab at Harvard as a postdoctoral fellow to study the involvement of microglia and monocytes in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. Following in the footsteps of her mentors, in 2017 she joined the Department of Neurology at Columbia as an Instructor in Neurology. Her current research focuses on exploring the extrinsic and cell autonomous factors that shape the function and phenotype of human microglia and how the resulting changes in the population structure of microglia contribute to the pathogenesis and progression of neurological diseases.