Name: Jasna Kriz MD, PhD
Affiliation:Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Neuroscience
Faculty of Medicine, Université Laval

Jasna Kriz is Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Faculty of Medicine, Université Laval, Québec, Canada. Dr Kriz obtained her MD at Universuty of Rijeka, Croatia, and PhD (collaborative program with McGill University in Montreal , Canada) followed by a postdoctoral training at Dept. Neurology & Neurosurgery at McGill University where she studied the role of resident glial cells and neuroinflammation in the pathogenesis of  chronic neurodegenerative disorders such aa amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).  In 2004 she was recruited by the Université Laval where she formed her research group.

Research Interests:  Dr Kriz research program focuses on the role of microglia/macrophages and innate immune response in the context of acute and chronic neurodegeneration. Her initial studies provided one of the first in vivo evidence of neuroprotective potential of microglia in injured brain. To visualize microglial activation, neuronal stress and innate immune c scade from the brains of living animals she created series of mouse models of bioluminescence and fluorescence allowing the non-invasive and time-lapse imaging of immune response in adult and neonatal brains.  These model systems representpowerful analytical tools that are implemented for understanding the in vivopathology and in vivopharmacology in brain injuries as well as in ALS/FTD disease models and resulting in many high impact publications.

Currently her research group studies the role of RNA binding proteins such as SRSF3 as regulators of innate immune genes translation and myeloid cells activation. Namely, she developed a novel in vivo model system for analysis of dynamic translational state of microglia/macrophage ribosomes withmRNA as input and newly synthesized peptides as output. This work is ultimately aimed at discovering new targets and development of novel strategies for therapeutic reprogramming of innate immune response in neurological disorders.

During her career, Dr Kriz acted as regular member of several national and international Peer review committee panels including Canadian Institutes for Health Research, Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada and more recently FRQS (Le Funds de recherche du Québec en santé). In 2006 (2006-2011) she was awarded prestigious Career Award from the R&D/HRF/CIHR (Canadian Institutes for Health Research), followed by a very competitive Senior Scholarship Award from FRQS.