about me

Hi, I’m Dezerae.

I am currently a Senior Lecturer in Cell and Molecular Bioscience at the University of Wollongong, Australia, where I lead the NERVLAB - an interdisciplinary team investigating how endogenous retroviruses and proteostasis mechanisms shape neurodegenerative disease.

These diseases, including Alzheimer’s (AD), Parkinson’s (PD) and Motor Neuron (MND/ALS) disease, are unified by a failure in the machinery that normally keeps our cells healthy - the proteostasis network. Failures in this network allow the accumulation of damaged protein molecules into clumps within the brain. Despite decades of research, we do not yet have a straight answer as to the role of these clumps in disease onset and progression. Protein clumps, or aggregates, are rare and often heterogeneous, making them an elusive target for researchers trying to understand, prevent or reverse their toxicity.

So, we’ve set out on a detective mission to fingerprint protein aggregates released from the brains of MND patients using a toolbox of sensitive imaging techniques. With this fingerprint in hand, we have been able to identify which model systems produce a matching fingerprint, allowing researchers around the globe to interrogate aggregate properties associated with disease and opening the door to new treatments that specifically target these toxic properties. More recently, we’ve picked up a second thread in this investigation - tracing how ancient viral sequences embedded in our own genome, endogenous retroviruses, may be reactivated in disease and contribute to the same toxic cascade.

This work has taken me from Wollongong to postdoctoral positions at the University of Melbourne and, as a Lady Edith Wolfson Fellow, the University of Cambridge, before returning home to Wollongong to build the NERVLAB. Along the way, I’ve stayed a passionate, self-taught advocate for programming in the life sciences - through the Hacky Hours peer-to-peer coding network I founded, and now through Bench2Bytes the Python and open-science training program I run for researchers at UOW. By encouraging and mentoring fellow STEM women to pursue this traditionally male-dominated field, I hope to show them how integrating programming skills into their scientific research can empower them to seek out and solve more profound problems than ever before.

Thanks for stopping by - if you’d like to read more about what we get up to, check out some of the rambles or technical tidbits. If you’re more of a by-the-numbers fellow, you can find all my CV details here. Either way, feel free to drop me a comment on the contact page so we know you were here. Happy sciencing!