Justyna
Dobrowolska Zakaria

Dr. Zakaria received her Bachelor’s (Biology; 2006) from Creighton University and her Ph.D. in Neurosciences from Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) in 2013, under the mentorship of Dr. Randall Bateman. Throughout these studies, Dr. Zakaria examined the processing of Amyloid Precursor Protein (APP) in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Dr. Zakaria’s first post-doctoral fellowship focused on microRNA expression in pediatric Glioblastoma Multiforme brain tumors with Dr. Leonard (WUSTL/Nationwide Children’s Hospital).

Dr. Zakaria’s second post-doctoral fellowship (lab of Dr. Robert Vassar; Northwestern University) shifted her academic focus back to AD. She was appointed as a research assistant professor in 2018 at Northwestern’s Department of Neurology. During the last decade, her research program’s scope has been to characterize BACE1-mediated processing of APP in healthy humans and changes in AD.

Dr. Zakaria’s accomplishments include describing the phenomenon of APP circadian patterns in humans. Further, she developed now-patented methods for measuring the kinetics of sAPPß and sAPPa in healthy humans using highly sensitive stable isotope labeling kinetics/mass spectrometry methods. She translated these methods for the study of kinetic changes of these proteins in BACE1-inhibitor-treated rhesus monkeys, as well as in human AD. For the latter study, Dr. Zakaria was awarded the Outstanding Young Investigator Award (2017) by the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation.