Dr. Annie Ciernia is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of British Columbia and a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Understanding Gene Expression in the Brain. Dr. Ciernia completed her PhD in neurobiology and behaviour at the University of California, Irvine, and a postdoc in bioinformatics at the University of California, Davis.
Her research program integrates molecular biology, epigenetics, bioinformatics, and animal behaviour to investigate how gene regulatory mechanisms control microglial function and contribute to neuroinflammation across the lifespan. Since establishing her laboratory in 2019, Dr. Ciernia has uncovered novel mechanisms regulating histone acetylation and gene expression during microglial development and inflammatory responses. Her group has also developed widely used open-science tools to analyze microglial gene expression and morphology.
More recently, her research has expanded to investigate the gut-brain axis, revealing how microbiome-derived signals influence microglial function, neuroendocrine signalling, and sex-specific developmental programming. Building on this work, her laboratory has developed a novel germ-free mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease, enabling precise investigation of microbiome-microglial interactions in neurodegeneration. Through the integration of next-generation sequencing, computational biology, and in vivo and in vitro models, Dr. Ciernia’s research aims to define how disruptions in microglial gene regulation contribute to neuroinflammatory, neurodegenerative, and neuropsychiatric disorders, and to uncover mechanistic links between the gut microbiome and brain immune function.
