Gitalee Sarker

I was awarded the Novo Nordisk Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to work with Professor Ana Domingos and Professor David Paterson from the Department of Physiology, Anatomy, and Genetics, Professor Irina Udalova from Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology and Dr. Fang Zhang in NNRCO, starting from September 2019. My project, entitled ‘Neuroimmunity in Obesity and Cardiac Function’, aims to characterize the novel immune cell populations in the sympathetic neuro-adipose junctions as well as in the cardiac sympathetic stellate ganglia by single-cell RNA sequencing. The identified key immune cells will be subsequently followed up for human validation that may lead to develop new tissue-specific therapeutic targets for obesity and cardiac comorbidities. 

I completed my Ph.D. in Neuroscience at ETH Zurich in 2018 under the supervision of Professor Christian Wolfrum and Dr. Daria Peleg Raibstein.  During my Ph.D., I have investigated the long term impact of maternal overnutrition on brain, behaviors, and metabolism. My study reveals that perinatal maternal high fat diet-induced obesogenic and addictive like phenotypes can be conserved across three generations via the paternal lineage and identifies sperm tRNA derived small RNA as a potential epigenetic mark that partly mediates such abnormal traits to the progeny. Prior to my Ph.D., I attained an MSc in Neuroscience from the University of Bonn, Germany. I also hold a Bachelor in Medicine and Surgery (MBBS) from Dhaka Medical College, Bangladesh.