Alexandra Elise Sylvine Munch

Alexandra Münch is a Neuroscience PhD student at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. As a member of the Goate Lab, she studies the role of microglia in Alzheimer’s Disease in collaboration with Dr. Anne Schaefer’s laboratory. Her project focuses on validating a common genetic variant involved in AD risk–the MS4A locus–in human induced pluripotent stems and in vivo mouse models.

Alex was born in France and moved to Michigan in grade school, where she went on to earn her Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Kalamazoo College. As an HHMI summer research fellow she joined Dr. Eva Feldman’s laboratory at University of Michigan to study altered mitochondrial dynamics in diabetic peripheral neuropathy. After graduating, she spent a year teaching science for an educational start-up in Chicago called Kids Science Labs. Trading baking soda-vinegar volcanoes for pipettes, Alex returned to the bench at Stanford University in Dr. Ben Barres’ lab, where she worked with Dr. Shane Liddelow to characterize A1 reactive astrocytes following CNS disease and injury. Alex continued her adventures in glia at Stanford as lab manager of the Zuchero lab, researching actin dynamics in oligodendrocytes.