Dr. Anastassia Voronova PhD

Dr. Anastassia Voronova obtained her Ph.D. degree from the University of Ottawa under the tutelage of Dr. Ilona Skerjanc, where she studied the regulation of embryonic stem cells. During her postdoctoral fellowship at the Hospital for Sick Children in the laboratory of Drs. Freda Miller and David Kaplan, she made a seminal discovery how cell-cell communication between neural stem cells in the brain and a specific type of neuron, the inhibitory neuron, instructs neural stem cells in the developing brain to become oligodendrocytes, the building blocks of myelin in the white matter. Dr. Voronova is now an Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in Neural Stem Cell Biology at the University of Alberta. Her independent research program focuses on neuronally secreted chemokines regulate neural stem cell function in the developing and remyelinating brain.