Smitha Karunakaran, Ph.D., is a Visiting Senior Scientist at the Centre for Brain Research, Indian Institute of Science. She is a neurobiologist whose research focuses on the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, with particular emphasis on the locus coeruleus, hippocampus, astrocyte biology, and sex-specific vulnerability. Her laboratory investigates the sequence of cell-type-specific changes that emerge during early amyloid pathology and distinguishes these disease-associated alterations from those that occur during normal brain aging. This work aims to identify early mechanisms that contribute to the preclinical phase of Alzheimer’s disease, before overt neurodegeneration and dementia become apparent.

Smitha completed her Ph.D. at the National Brain Research Centre, Gurgaon, India, where she studied 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 focused on 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.