Marta Olah, PhD

Dr. Olah obtained her MSc degree in neurosciences from Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary and her PhD in biomedical sciences/neuroimmunology from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Following two postdoctoral fellowships in neuroimmunology at the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School Dr. Olah joined the Department of Neurology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center as a tenure track faculty member at the Instructor level, where she established a research program focusing on understanding the role of microglia in brain aging and neurodegenerative disease.

Microglia, the resident innate immune cells of the central nervous system (CNS) parenchyma, have long been implicated in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative disease, initially based on morphological changes observed in postmortem brain tissue of donors afflicted with neurodegenerative disease. This historical framework motivated therapeutic strategies aimed at broadly suppressing microglial activation. However, clinical efforts to globally inhibit these responses have largely failed to confer meaningful benefit, underscoring the pitfalls of non-selective immune modulation in the CNS. Recently, single-cell RNA-sequencing revealed that microglia are not a uniform population, but instead comprise of multiple transcriptionally and functionally specialized states. The current working hypothesis in the field is that, while there are a limited number of functionally distinct microglia subsets, disease specific changes in their relative abundance generates microglia phenotypic landscapes that are unique to each neurodegenerative condition. Accordingly, the key therapeutic objective is precise reprogramming of the microglial state landscape in order to shift the balance among subsets toward protective configurations. In order to be able to do so, the overarching goal of the Olah lab is to understand which microglial states are relevant in brain aging and specific neurodegenerative diseases and neurological disorders and how the distinctive biology of the different microglia subsets drives their disease associations. The Olah lab pursues this goal by exploring the extrinsic (e.g. environmental) and cell autonomous (e.g. epigenetic, transcriptomic and metabolic) factors that shape the function and phenotype of human microglia and how dysregulation in the biological processes of microglia subset specification can lead to maladaptive microglia population structure which ultimately may contribute to brain aging and the pathogenesis and progression of neurodegenerative diseases.