Ilona Chudotvorova
Name: Ilona Chudotvorova
Position: : postdoctoral fellow
Education: B.S. - Odessa National Mechnikov University (Ukraine) 1999
Ph.D. - Mediterranean University (Marseille, France) 2006
Contact: ilona@brandeis.edu
Hometown: Odessa, Ukraine
Personal Interests: As person who has spent almost all of life near the sea I love swimming (sea or ocean), I also enjoy horse-riding, dancing, reading and traveling all around the globe.
If I weren't a scientist I'd be... a psychotherapist and I'd help people to make themselves happy
Research Interests: I am interested in understanding the interplay between the different molecular events responsible for synaptic development and plasticity. I carried out my graduate research in the Institute of Neurobiology (Marseille, France), under the guidance of Dr. Igor Medina. His conceptual and experimental approaches inspired me and prompted me to pursue a research project focused on the elucidation of the molecular mechanisms involved in neuronal plasticity. I examined the role of potassium chloride co-transporter, KCC2 in neuronal plasticity, using imaging and molecular approaches. For my postdoctoral training, I decided to join the laboratory of Dr. Robakis in Mount Sinai School of Medicine, NY to become more familiar with different mechanisms involved in neurodegenerative diseases, including neuronal survival and plasticity. Now, I am working in the laboratory of Suzanne Paradis where I am studying GABAA receptor trafficking during development in primary hippocampal culture. Using live cell imaging and RNAi technology, my goals are to identify and characterize the molecules and mechanisms responsible for the modulation of GABAA receptor trafficking in neurons.