From June 4 to June 6, 2013, Loews Philadelphia hotel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania played host to Cambridge Healthtech Institute’s 12th annual World Pharma Congress and the Targeting Parkinson’s Disease Symposium. Invited to the symposium were a number of researchers and scientists trying to understand and find treatments for the disease. Among those invited was Tufts University Assistant Professor Gizem Donmez.

Gizem Donmez began research at Tufts University in the fall of 2011. “I left the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work as a tenure track assistant professor at Tufts University’s Department of Neuroscience. I began research on the role sirtuins played in neurodegenerative diseases at MIT and continued my research at Tufts University,” says Gizem Donmez.
Gizem Donmez was soon recognized for her research at Tufts University and was invited to the symposium in 2012. “I was honored to be a presenter, even though I had worked for less than a year at the university,” says Gizem Donmez.

She presented “Sirt1 Protects Against a-Synuclein Aggregation by Acting Molecular Chaperones,” on the first day of the symposium. Her research led Gizem Donmez to see Sirt1 as a protection against disease in mice. Through her research, Gizem Donmez hopes a therapeutic treatment for neurodegenerative diseases may be developed.

While the symposium in Philadelphia focused on Parkinson’s disease, Gizem Donmez’s research expands to other diseases and age-related conditions of the brain. Gizem Donmez’s research is relevant to another common age-related disease: Alzheimer’s disease. Gizem Donmez sums up her research in the following way: “Aging increases susceptibility to a variety of diseases. I focus on the role of sirtuins in brain aging and age-related conditions and diseases in the brain.”

While Gizem Donmez’s research is directly relevant to Parkinson’s research, her discoveries carry further implications about more than one neurodegenerative disease. By studying sirtuins, Gizem Donmez hopes to discover how sirtuins perform during aging and the development of degenerative disease.
Gizem Donmez completed her PhD in molecular biology and biochemistry at Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. Her postdoctoral training was performed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 2007 and 2011. Gizem Donmez will continue to study the effects of sirtuins and neurodegenerative diseases.