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PRIYA PRAKASH

POSTDOCTORAL SCIENTIST

priya.prakash@nyulangone.org | @pryprk.bsky.social

Priya is originally from Bengaluru, India, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology Engineering before moving to the United States to pursue a master’s in Biological Sciences at Purdue University. She joined the Purdue Interdisciplinary Life Sciences graduate program in 2015, where her doctoral research in Gaurav Chopra’s lab combined chemical biology and neuroscience to investigate glial dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). During her PhD, Priya developed several innovative tools, including a pH-sensitive Aβ probe (AβpH) for real-time imaging of glial phagocytosis and pH-activable fluorescent probes for live-cell imaging of subcellular organelles.

Building on these approaches, she identified a lipid droplet–mediated mechanism of microglial dysfunction in AD, demonstrating that amyloid-β drives DGAT2-dependent lipid droplet formation that impairs phagocytic clearance of amyloid plaques. This discovery directly linked microglial lipid metabolism to neurodegeneration. Her graduate work earned multiple awards, including the Eli Lilly–Stark Neurosciences Predoctoral Fellowship and the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation Young Investigator Award.

As a postdoctoral fellow in the Liddelow lab, Priya now investigates how oligodendrocyte metabolic impairment and astrocyte reactivity contribute to neurodegeneration, with a focus on X-linked dystonia-parkinsonism and AD. Her work is supported by the Leon Levy Fellowship and an Alzheimer’s Association Research Fellowship Award.

 

KEY PUBLICATIONS

(* = equal contribution)

  1. Prakash P*, Manchanda P*, Paouri E, Bisht K, Sharma K, Rajpoot J, Wendt V, Hossain A, Wijewardhane PR, Randolph CE, Chen Y, Stanko S, Gasmi N, Gjojdeshi A, Card S, Fine J, Jethava KP, Clark MG, Dong B, Ma S, Crockett A, Thayer EA, Nicolas M, Davis R, Hardikar D, Allende D, Prayson RA, Zhang C, Davalos D, Chopra G (2025) Amyloid-β induces lipid droplet-mediated microglial dysfunction via the enzyme DGAT2 in Alzheimer's disease. Immunity. 58(6):1536-1552.e8. PMID: 40393454.

  2. Prakash P, Randolph CE, Walker KE, Chopra G (2025) Lipids: emerging players of microglial biology. Glia 73(3):657-677. PMID: 39688320.

  3. Prakash P, Erdjument-Bromage H, O'Dea MR, Munson CN, Labib D, Fossati V, Neubert TA, Liddelow SA (2023) Proteomic profiling of interferon-responsive reactive astrocytes in rodent and human. Glia 72(3):625-642. PMID: 38031883.

  4. Guttenplan KA, Weigel MK*, Prakash P*, Wijewardhane PR, Hasel P, Rufen-Blanchette U, Münch AE, Blum JA, Fine J, Neal MC, Bruce KD, Gitler AD, Chopra G, Liddelow SA, Barres BA (2021) Neurotoxic reactive astrocytes induce cell death via saturated lipids. Nature 599:102–107. PMID: 34616039.

  5. Prakash P*, Jethava KP*, Korte N*, Izquierdo P*, Favuzzi E, Rose IVL, Guttenplan KA, Manchanda P, Dutta S, Rochet JC, Fishell G, Liddelow SA, Attwell D, Chopra G (2021) Monitoring phagocytic uptake of amyloid β into glial cell lysosomes in real time. Chem Sci 12(32):10901-10918. PMID: 34476070.