Professor Elena Galea passes away
Elena Galea, ICREA Senior researcher and member of the Institute of Neurosciences and the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department since 2003, passed away on 23 January 2023. The UAB expresses its deepest condolences to the people who knew and loved her and is deeply saddened by her death.
Elena studied Biology at the Autonomous University of Madrid, where she also completed her PhD. In 1992, she became a post-doctoral researcher in the Medicine School of Cornell University, New York, where she later became a professor. In 1998, she was appointed associate professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago until 2003. During that time she was also a visiting professor at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. After this extended experience abroad, she returned to Spain as an ICREA professor at the UAB. She was part of the Institut de Neurociències, of which she was vice director between 2008 and 2010, and an associate professor in the UAB Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. She was also a visiting professor at the Massachusetts General Institute for Neurodegenerative disease, at Harvard Medical School, Boston.
She studied how the function of astrocytes contributes to cognition, memory and emotion, and how alterations in these mechanisms can impact the development of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's.
Elena leaves a void in our university and in the entire field of neuroscience, both for her personal and scientific quality, as well as for her training activity of excellence. Her imprint will remain with us as an example of scientific rigor and personal demand.