Shermali Gunawardena, PhD

Shermali Gunawardena PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and in the Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY. She received her BS degree in biology and her MS degree in genetics from the University of Arizona. She continued her graduate research at the same institution and received her PhD in genetics and cell biology (Flinn Foundation fellow). Gunawardena performed her postdoctoral studies at the University of California San Diego (a Wills Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, an Ellison Medical Foundation/AFAR Senior Postdoctoral Fellow). As an assistant project scientist at the University of California, San Diego, she was funded by a New Investigator Research Grant from the Alzheimer Association. Gunawardena started her independent career as an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2008.  Her research is focused on understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms of the Alzheimer's disease proteins amyloid precursor protein (APP) and Presenilin (PS), and the Huntington's disease protein Huntingtin (HTT), with the rationale of unraveling how disease is initiated.