HOLLY GILDEA

POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW

holly.gildea@nyulangone.org | @holly_gildea

Holly received her Bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience with Honors from Brown University in 2016. While there, she worked in the lab of Dr. Alexander Jaworski investigating axon guidance in the spinal cord. 

For her graduate work, Holly moved to California, where she completed her PhD in neuroscience in the laboratory of Dr. Andrew Dillin at UC Berkeley in 2022. In this work, she investigated how cellular protein folding stress responses in the astrocyte-like glia of C. elegans contribute to longevity. Holly found that induction of the heat shock response in cephalic sheath glia of the worm is sufficient to extend lifespan and increase stress resistance through a novel neural mechanism. 

During her graduate work, Holly was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for her research, as well as the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor and Teaching Effectiveness Awards for her instruction of undergraduates. She was also awarded an NIA F99/K00 Transition to Aging Research award, which continues to fund her work on astrocyte contributions to aging-related neurological disease in the Liddelow lab.

KEY PUBLICATIONS

  1. Gildea HK, Frankino PA, Tronnes SU, Pender CL, Choi HO, Hunter TD, Cheung SS, Frakes AE, Sukarto E, Dillin A. Glia of C. elegans coordinate the heat shock response independent of the neuronal thermosensory circuit and serotonin. Sci Adv 8(49):eabq3970. PMID: 36490338.

  2. Frakes AE, Metcalf MG, Tronnes SU, Gildea HK, Kandahari N, Monshietehadi S, Dillin A (2020) Four glial cells regulate ER stress resistance and longevity via neuropeptide signaling. Science 367(6476):436-440. PMID: 31974253.

  3. Jaworski A, Tom I, Tong RK, Gildea HK, Koch AW, Gonzalez LC, Tessier-Lavigne M (2015) Operational redundancy in axon guidance through the multifunctional receptor Robo3 and its ligand NELL2. Science 350(6263):961-965. PMID: 26586761.