Fibrin does one job well. When you cut yourself, it knits your blood into a clot and stops the bleeding.
But when the wall that separates the bloodstream from the brain springs a leak, fibrin slips into a place it was never meant to reach. There it sounds an alarm. It wakes the brain’s immune cells, feeds inflammation and, over years, wears down the nerve cells around it.
Katerina Akassoglou spent two decades chasing that alarm. On Sept. 1, she brings the chase to Troy.
Akassoglou, one of the world’s leading brain scientists, is joining the Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine, a joint venture between Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. She arrives as the center’s Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Constellation Chair, with a faculty seat at both RPI’s School of Science and the Icahn School of Medicine.
