Lezanne Ooi

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Lezanne Ooi is an Australian neuroscientist and the Professor and Head of Neurodevelopment at the University of Wollongong. She develops cellular imaging techniques to study neurodegenerative diseases.

Ooi trained in the United Kingdom, where she studied biochemistry at the University of York and worked with GlaxoSmithKline. Her grandmother’s dementia inspired her to study neurodegenerative disease. She did her PhD on REST, a transcriptional repressor, at the University of Leeds and stayed there as a postdoctoral researcher, researching cardiac hypertrophy and neuronal function using imaging. Her work showed that certain heart-related molecules rise in hypertrophy, and that increasing REST could slow this rise.

In 2012, she moved to the University of Wollongong as a professor of neuroscience. Her lab has created and characterized more than 100 induced pluripotent stem cell lines. She has studied motor neuron disease and vanishing white matter disease, a type of leukodystrophy. She has also explored how COVID-19 affects the likelihood of developing dementia.

In 2022, she received funding from the Michael J. Fox Foundation to study Parkinson’s disease. Her research focuses on the neuronal changes that occur during neurodegenerative disease, including changes in lipids and metabolites that could serve as biomarkers for Parkinson’s.