Rebecca Wallings, PhD

Rebecca Wallings is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of Professor Malu Tansey at the University of Florida. Her research career began at UCL, where she completed her MSc in Clinical Neuroscience in 2017 which culminated in a research thesis with the Institute of Neurology investigating the role of LRRK2 in autophagy regulation in macrophages. She then went on to complete her DPhil in Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at the University of Oxford in 2018 under the supervision of Professor Richard Wade-Martins, Director of the Oxford Parkinson’s Disease Centre, and Dr. Natalie Connor-Robson. Her thesis focused on the role of LRRK2 in the autophagy pathway and identified a novel LRRK2-substrate, v-type H+ ATPase proton pump (v-ATPase a1), with LRRK2-mutations disrupting this interaction and causing lysosomal dysfunction in neurons. Rebecca's post doctoral research at the University of Florida is focused on understanding the role of the lysosome in inflammation in models of PD and dementia, with a keen interest in the role of both LRRK2 and progranulin at the interface of lysosomal function and inflammation.