American neuroscientist
Annalisa Scimemi (born 1974) is a neuroscientist on the faculty of the State University of New York at Albany (SUNY).
Early life and education.
Born in Tuscany in 1974, Annalisa Scimemi studied Biological Sciences at the Università di Pisa (1993–1998) as a first-generation college student. Her undergraduate thesis focused on the biophysical properties of calcium activated potassium channels in human erythrocytes in Steinert disease. Scimemi earned her Ph.D. in Biophysics from the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA/ISAS) in Trieste, Italy in 2001, studying the development of rhythmic circuits underlying locomotor-like behaviors in the opossum "Monodelphis domestica", under the supervision of John G. Nicholls and Enrico Cherubini.
Career.
In 2002, Scimemi joined the lab of Dimitri M. Kullmann at University College London. At UCL, Scimemi studied central synapses and neurotransmitter spillover, working with Dimitri M. Kullmann, Dmitri A. Rusakov, Matthew C. Walker, and others.
In 2005, Scimemi moved to the United States to join the lab of Jeffrey S. Diamond at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. She continued to study hippocampal synapses, analyzing more specifically at the role of neuronal and astrocytic glutamate transporters in regulating inter-synaptic cross-talk. After earning an appointment as Research Fellow at NIH in 2010, she studied how the spatial distribution of calcium channels in the presynaptic active zone affects glutamate release at hippocampal synapses. She also started new collaborations that branched her research focus to Alzheimer's disease.
Scimemi joined the faculty of the Department of Biology at SUNY Albany in 2013 and became an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Physics in 2015. She became an Associate Professor in 2019. In her lab, she aims to identify how neurons and astrocytes regulate encoding of spatial information and reward-based behaviors in health and disease.
Since 2017, she has served as an instructor for the summer course, "Ion Channels in Synaptic &amp; Neural Circuit Physiology," at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Her scientific interests, though rooted in synaptic physiology, branch to other fields of neuroscience including systems neuroscience, which she fueled during her sabbatical in the lab of Bernardo Sabatini at Harvard Medical School.
Research.
Scimemi studies the functional properties of central synapses and how they are tuned by non-neuronal cells called astrocytes in neuropsychiatric disorders, using techniques such as electrophysiology, optogenetics, two-photon laser scanning microscopy, and reaction-diffusion computer simulations. Her works provide insights into how synaptic transmission changes in the hippocampus with circadian cycles.
Scimemi's software "NRN-EZ" providing easy access to biophysical modeling of neurons (allowing distribution of synaptic inputs onto digitally reconstructed neurons) was described in one of Scientific Reports' 100 most-downloaded research studies in 2023.
References.
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