Smitha Karunakaran, Ph.D., is an Senior Scientist at the Centre for Brain Research. As a neurobiologist specializing in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, her research primarily focuses on understanding the sequence of cell-type specific changes occurring in the locus coeruleus and hippocampus, and differentiating these changes from those associated with normal brain aging. This distinction is essential for reconstructing the causal events that lead to the preclinical phase of asymptomatic pathological accumulation, ultimately resulting in dementia.

Smitha completed her PhD at the National Brain Research Centre (Gurgaon, India), where her research focused on the molecular mechanisms underlying selective neuronal vulnerability in Parkinson’s Disease. From 2010 to 2015, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (Basel, Switzerland), where her work primarily centered on the neural circuit mechanisms involved in long-term memory consolidation. In September 2017, she joined the Centre for Brain Research at the Indian Institute of Science as a faculty member.