Dr. Anna Szabo
Post Doc
annabszabo@gmail.com
Following initial training in psychology and human movement sciences, I completed a Master's degree in integrative neurosciences at the University of Paris-Saclay. I then pursued a PhD in the same field at the University of Toulouse, conducting translational research focusing on the impact of network hyperexcitability during sleep on memory consolidation processes in Alzheimer’s disease. Through a combination of electrophysiology and pharmacological experiments, we discovered that noradrenergic signalling during wakefulness, and to a certain extent during sleep, can counterbalance baseline network hyperexcitability in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease. This explains why this phenomenon is closely associated with REM sleep in several other AD models. Given the translational nature of this project, which I would like to continue in my future work, we also studied this phenomenon in humans.
Using polysomnography coupled with neuropsychological tests on a group of patients with early-stage Alzheimer's disease and a control group, we established the prevalence of network hyperexcitability and aimed to develop methods to improve its detection.
Since 2024, I have been a course tutor in sleep medicine at the University of Oxford, and since March 2026, I am also working as a part-time postdoctoral researcher in the Genzel Lab. During my postdoctoral research, I intend to futher explore how network hyperexcitability affects sleep microarchitecture in rodent models of AD and study the impact of exacerbating or alleviating this hyperexcitability through pharmacological treatment on memory consolidation and related oscillatory patterns. Another important objective for the coming year is to examine (f)MRI and EEG data from AD patients and controls to further decipher how we can improve the non-invasive detection of elusive, transitory, low-amplitude epileptic events in this cohort, exploiting these metrics.