Naia marcelino
undergraduate Researcher
Naia is an undergraduate student at Barnard College of Columbia University majoring in Neuroscience and Behavior. She worked for two years in the Translational Neurobiology of Development (TrND) Lab at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where she researched autism spectrum disorder. There, she helped establish an awake-behaving mouse electrophysiology system and used recordings and chemogenetics to study the timing of synaptic changes during learning across multiple memory systems. In the summer of 2025, Naia joined the Victor Lab to investigate how genetic variation shapes microglial inflammatory responses to amyloid beta fibrils. In her project, she differentiated induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) CRISPR-edited to carry protective or risk alleles for Alzheimer’s disease into microglia-like cells and performed pulse-chase experiments to track the induction and resolution of pro-inflammatory states across genotypes. Through metabolic profiling and functional assays, Naia demonstrated that microglial phagocytosis of amyloid beta is closely tied to their metabolic state and that exogenous supplementation of specific metabolites can reinvigorate exhausted microglia, restoring their ability to clear pathological aggregates.
Naia is currently spending the academic year abroad at the University of Oxford, where she is conducting research at the Wade-Martins group, optogenetically testing connectivity within a microfluidic Parkinson’s circuit.
Email: nlm2164@barnard.edu
