Selene
Lomoio

Dr. Selene Lomoio is a neuroscientist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Born and trained in Italy, she earned her B.Sc. in Biomedical Sciences, M.Sc. in Neurobiology, and Ph.D. in Cell Biology from the University of Pavia, with a visiting scholarship at University Hospital Bellvitge in Barcelona. She then crossed the Atlantic to join the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Laboratory at Tufts University in Boston, first as a postdoctoral fellow and then as faculty in the Department of Neuroscience, before joining Mount Sinai. Mentorship and collaboration are threads that run through everything she does. She has trained scientists across three countries at every stage of their careers, many of whom have gone on to MD and PhD programs. Along the way, she has built collaborations across academia and industry spanning neuroscience, bioengineering, and translational medicine. Her research goes upstream, targeting the molecular events that set neurodegeneration in motion long before symptoms surface. Her work has linked GGA3 loss-of-function and a rare human GGA3 variant to BACE1-driven axonopathy, contributing to a growing body of evidence that axonal dysfunction is an early initiating event in Alzheimer’s disease. This work was supported during her postdoctoral years by a fellowship from the BrightFocus Foundation. To bring these findings into a human context, she developed iPSC-derived 3D bioengineered neural tissue models that recapitulate time-dependent features of Alzheimer’s disease, faithfully capturing disease progression over time. She is now taking this further with organ-on-a-chip platforms to dissect what keeps axons healthy and what drives them to fail, exploring the interplay between axonal transport, synaptic connectivity, and myelination across multiple neurodegenerative diseases, building toward therapeutic strategies that could reach beyond any single diagnosis.