Draft:Sarah Kucenas

Sarah Kucenas is an academic, professor, and scientist based in Virginia She is a professor of biology, director of the Program in Fundamental Neuroscience and co-director of the Brain Institute at the University of Virginia. She is also an Associate Editor for the research journal Glial Health Research. She earned her PhD in Pharmacological and Physiological Sciences and completed her postdoctoral studies in Developmental Neurobiology. Her research studies the role of glia in the development, maintenance, and regeneration of the nervous system. She aims to help increase observation and understanding of glial cell origins, behaviors, and interaction in an intact vertebrate.

Early Life

Sarah Kucenas was born on March 25th, 1979, in St. Louis, Missouri. Her mother was a Spanish teacher and her father worked in business, her family also included one younger brother and family dogs. She attended public school from kindergarten through twelfth grade, when she graduated from high school in 1997, and from the age of 6 through high school and college, Kucenas was an avid swimmer, referring to the sport as self-care in the opportunity of meditation. Growing up, she wanted to be a pediatric neurosurgeon, driven by fascination in the brain as the source of humanity.

Education and Career

Kucenas attended Valparaiso University in Indiana from 1997 to 2000, where she majored in Biology with minors in Chemistry and English. Before attending graduate school, Kucenas worked her first job as a research technician in Dr. M. Alan Permutt's lab in St. Louis, Missouri.

Kucenas received her graduate training in Dr. Mark Voigt's lab at Saint Louis University in the fall of 2001. She studied the role of purinergic P2X receptors in neural development in a zebrafish model, and she completed her PhD in Pharmacological and Physiological Sciences in 2005. Kucenas continued investigating zebrafish during her post-doctoral training in Dr. Bruce Appel's lab at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. From 2005 to 2009, Kucenas studied the developmental neurobiology of glial cells using time-lapse imaging in Dr. Appel's lab.

In August 2009, Kucenas joined the University of Virginia (UVA) Department of Biology as Professor of Biology. In 2013, she received a Class Hartwell Individual Biomedical Research Award from the Hartwell Foundation for her work titled "Promoting Nervous System Self-Repair to Treat Peripheral Neurodegeneration and Demyelination in Children". In 2018, she received a Landis Award for Outstanding Mentorship from the NIH/NINDS for her incredible mentorship.

Research

Dr. Sarah Kucenas has researched the cellular and molecular mechanisms that drive glial development for her entire career, which has spanned more than 23 years. In her lab, they study how glia engineer neural development via glial-glial and neuronal-glial interactions for nearly 15 years. The Kucenas Lab has discovered previously unknown glial populations and subtypes by leveraging zebrafish (Danio rerio) as a model organism, along with genetic and pharmacological interventions, single-cell manipulation, laser ablation, small molecule screening, single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq), proximity proteomics, and in vivo, time-lapse imaging techniques. She also studies glial-mediated debris clearance, glial diversity, and the glia's role in regeneration. In the Kucenas Lab they "chase the weird and train the next generations of diverse scientists.

Personal Life

Dr. Sarah Kucenas, aside from her professional endeavors, lives a personal life modeled through her dedication to her family and personal well-being. She lives with her husband, Adam, and her daughter, Madelyn, and she has three Mastiffs: Harley, Titan, and Chewbacca. Beyond her academic and family interest, Sarah has a passion for swimming.