Hasan Ishtayeh Awarded Two-Year Postdoctoral Fellowship
The fellowship will support Hasan Ishtayeh’s postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford.
Hasan Ishtayeh, a Ph.D. candidate in the laboratory of Prof. Avraham Ashkenazi at the Gray Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, has been awarded a two-year postdoctoral fellowship from the Israeli Council for Higher Education’s Planning and Budgeting Committee (VATAT). The competitive national fellowship supports outstanding Arab researchers pursuing postdoctoral training abroad.
During his Ph.D., Ishtayeh studied how disruptions in the cellular systems responsible for removing and recycling damaged proteins can contribute to neurodegenerative diseases. His work in the Ashkenazi Lab resulted in two first-author publications.
One study investigated defects in autophagy, the cellular recycling process, in oculopharyngeal muscular dystrophy (OPMD). The other identified an enzyme that may represent a potential therapeutic target in Huntington’s disease.
At the University of Oxford, Ishtayeh will study how cellular waste-disposal systems are disrupted in Parkinson’s disease and how this may affect the spread of alpha-synuclein, a protein associated with the disease. In particular, he will investigate extracellular vesicles—small particles released by cells—and examine whether they can influence surrounding brain cells and the immune system.
The long-term goal of his research is to better understand how Parkinson’s disease progresses and to identify biological pathways that could potentially be targeted by future treatments.
The Gray Faculty congratulates Hasan on this achievement and wishes him continued success in his postdoctoral research at Oxford.
