Affiliation: Florida Atlantic University. Department of Biological Sciences.

Dr. Laura Fontenas obtained her BS in Biology from the University of Poitiers (France) in 2010, where she discovered a passion for glial cells. She obtained an MS in Neuroscience from Paris-Sud University in 2012, where she established a microarray screen for novel genes regulating Schwann cell development using zebrafish with Dr. Marcel Tawk, a foundation for her graduate work. In the Tawk lab, she showed the important role of neuron-glia interactions in peripheral nerve development and obtained her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Paris-Sud in 2015. In 2016, Dr. Fontenas moved to the US to carry out her postdoctoral research in Dr. Sarah Kucenas’ lab at the University of Virginia, where she characterized a previously unknown type of peripheral glia that originate in the spinal cord, as well as mechanisms that control glial cell migration at the borders of the nervous system. She used a combination of genetic and laser ablation, lineage tracing, genome editing techniques, and in vivo imaging in zebrafish larvae. She started as an assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University in Fall 2022, where her lab investigates myelinating glial cell migration and plasticity in the healthy and injured nervous system.