Katerina Akassoglou

In 2008, Akassoglou accepted a position as an Associate Investigator at the Gladstone Institutes of Neurological Disease, maintaining an Adjunct Professorship in Pharmacology at UCSD. Akassoglou is also a Professor of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco Weill Institute for Neurosciences and she now Directs the Gladstone Center for In Vivo Imaging Research. Her lab focuses on in vivo imaging to observe the behavior of immune and glial cells in the CNS during their interactions with blood proteins.

In 2004, Akassoglou joined the faculty in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego, where she is Adjunct Professor of Pharmacology. Akassoglou's lab was centered around exploring neurovascular regulation of inflammation and tissue repair in the context of various neurological diseases. Akassoglou's lab seeks to understand how blood proteins interact with cells and disrupt signalling in the brain parenchyma in times of blood-brain barrier disruption. The overall goal of the lab is to target these mechanisms therapeutically in neurological disease to stop neurodegeneration and inflammation in the central nervous system.

Akassoglou pursued her undergraduate degree at the University of Athens, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in biology in 1996. She stayed at the University of Athens for her graduate degree, where she focused on neuroimmunology. Her work explored the role of the cytokine TNFα in neuroinflammation under the mentorship of George Kollias and Lesley Probert within the Hellenic Pasteur Institute. During her PhD, Akassoglou pursued training in neuropathology under the mentorship of Hans Lassman at the University of Vienna, Austria. After completing her graduate studies in 1998, Akassoglou went to the United States to pursue her postdoctoral training under the mentorship of Sid Strickland at both the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the Rockefeller University. She specialized in neurovascular biology and began to study the actions of Fibrin in the central nervous system. She completed her postdoctoral training with Strickland in 2002 and then pursued a second postdoctoral fellowship at the New York University in the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine until 2003.