Julia Thayer, PhD

Julia Thayer joined the FTDC in April 2026 as a Senior Research Investigator in the lab of Dr. Allison Snyder. She completed her Ph.D. in Toxicology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore under the mentorship of Dr. Marta Lipinski. Her dissertation focused on characterizing the roll of the deubiquitinating enzyme USP24 in autophagy. She followed her Ph.D. with a postdoctoral fellowship in the Neurogenetics Branch at NINDS under the mentorship of Dr. Derek Narendra. Her postdoctoral project explored novel regulators of the PINK1/Parkin mitophagy pathway. Julia is a cell biologist by training and is passionate about neurodegeneration research – specifically cellular modeling of variants of uncertain significance and she supports spatial transcriptomic research in the center.