Lindsay M. De Biase

Lindsay M. De Biase is an American neuroscientist and glial biologist as well as an assistant professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. De Biase explores the diversity of microglia that exist within the basal ganglia circuitry to one day target regional or circuit-specific microglia in disease. De Biase's graduate work highlighted the existence and roles of neuron-OPC synapses in development and her postdoctoral work was critical in showing that microglia are not homogenous within the brain parenchyma.

Early life and education De Biase pursued her undergraduate degree at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. De Biase majored in Cellular, Molecular, and Developmental Biology and received her Bachelors of Science in 2003. She found that TH2 cells express the NKG2A and CD56 upon activation while TH1 cells do not. De Biase completed her graduate training in neuroscience under the mentorship of Dwight Bergles.

De Biase first characterized the expression patterns and roles of NG2+ oligodendrocyte progenitors in the mouse brain. She further found that these cells exhibited low amplitude spikes, but not action potentials and that later in their development, this spiking ability was lost as well as their synaptic input and glutamate receptors. When she knocked out NMDARs in OPCs, De Biase did not observe effects on differentiation or cell survival, but she did find significant changes in AMPAR expression, suggesting that NMDARs help to regulate AMPAR signalling with neighbouring axons in development.

Career and research De Biase completed her graduate training in 2011 and then pursued her postdoctoral work under the mentorship of Antonello Bonci at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

In 2018, De Biase joined the faculty at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. She found that the anatomical features, lysosomal content, membrane properties, and transcriptomes of microglia differ across the basal ganglia nuclei. They found that by the second postnatal week, microglia population numbers peak in nucleus accumbens (NAc) and by the third postnatal week they peak in the ventral tegmental area (VTA). 2018 NARSAD Young Investigator Award 2017 NIDA Postdoctoral Fellow Mentoring Award 2017 NIDA Women's Science Advisory Committee, Excellence in Scientific Research Award 2014-2016 Fellows Award for Research Excellence, NIH 2009 Robert Goodman Scholars Award, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine