Becca Beiter

Postdoctoral Associate

I graduated from Franciscan University in 2015 with a degree in Psychology. While at Franciscan I worked with Dr. Stephen Sammut studying the prevalence and correlates of symptoms of depression and anxiety in college students. After graduating I joined the lab of Wendy Lynch at the University of Virginia as a research assistant where I studied the role of exercise in modulating relapse in cocaine addiction. In 2016 I began my Ph.D at the University of Virginia in the lab of Dr. Alban Gautier. During my Ph.D I used single-cell sequencing to demonstrate that there are two distinct populations of oligodendrocyte progenitor cells in the adult brain. I went on to demonstrate how clusterin, a gene connected to Alzheimer’s disease and upregulated in one population of OPCs, is able to control OPC function. I finished my Ph.D in August 2022 and then joined Dr. Schafer’s lab as a postdoctoral associate. In the Schafer lab I will focus on investigating the role of juxtavascular microglia in disease states and profiling how microglia and OPCs interact.