Eugenia V Gurevich

Biography:

Dr. Eugenia V Gurevich completed her doctorate in neuroscience in Moscow State University. She trained as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Jeffrey Joyce at the University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, USA, and then accepted the position as the Brain Bank Director and Staff Scientist at Sun Health Research Institute in Sun City, Arizona, where she conducted research on dopamine receptor functions in Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia with the focus on postmortem studies of the human brain. Since 2003, Dr. Gurevich is a faculty member of the Department of Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, (Assistant Professor 2003-2009, Associate Professor from 2009), where she conducts research on the regulation of dopaminergic signaling in the normal and diseased brain. She is particularly interested in the functional role of proteins, G protein-coupled receptor kinases (GRKs) and arrestins, controlling desensitization of G protein-coupled receptors n neural pathologies such as Parkinson’s disease, L-DOPA-induced dyskinesia, and drug addiction. She is an expert on the use of viral gene transfer technology to induce protein expression or knockdown in the brain of living animals. Dr. Gurevich has pioneered the study of the role of GRKs and arrestins in L-DOPA-induced dyskinesia with the goal of targeting these proteins to control dyskinesia and other L-DOPA-induced motor complications. This work may eventually lead to the development of novel therapies for Parkinson’s disease and drug discoveries targeting GRK proteins.