Dr. Evgenia Salta
Principal Investigator, Netherlands Institute of Neuroscience
Postdoctoral Fellow, KU Leuven (Belgium)
PhD, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece)
There is a particular kind of relief that comes from discovering your love of something. For Dr. Evgenia Salta, this arrived in the lab of Dr. Theodoros Sklaviadis during her undergraduate studies at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. She had sought a research position after realizing a career behind the pharmacy counter wasn’t for her. The Sklaviadis lab studied prion diseases: a class of fatal neurodegenerative disorders caused by misfolded proteins that propagate through brain tissue. This was Evgenia's first contact with the brain. What captivated her most wasn’t just the disease itself, but one of its defining consequences: memory loss. What happens in the brain when people start to forget? Today, Dr. Evgenia Salta continues to explore neurodegeneration and memory loss as a Group Leader at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam.
For her PhD, Evgenia stayed in the Sklaviadis lab and took her work on prion diseases into new territory. "Before, I was more of a visitor," she says of the shift from undergraduate to doctoral researcher, "...and then I became part of the household." At the time of her doctoral studies, worldwide outbreaks of mad cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, had triggered a wave of international research urgency focused on how humans developed prion diseases. Evgenia's PhD project focused on an underexplored route of exposure: aquaculture. If fish raised for human consumption were fed meat and bone meal derived from potentially infected animals, could the fish develop prion disease? How could that pathology then reach humans? To answer these questions, Evgenia developed custom antibodies targeting prion proteins that had not yet been characterized. While this process was difficult and technically demanding, she later recognized it as one of the most valuable experiences of her career. She learned to assess brain pathology through an array of methods assessing both gene and protein expression. She also learned to sit with data that contradicted her hypotheses and to find meaning in unexpected results rather than dismissing them. Evgenia found that fish orally exposed to prion-infected tissue developed abnormal prion protein deposits in the brain. This was evidence that the disease could, in principle, reach the human food chain through aquaculture. Thanks to foundational research like Evgenia’s and sweeping legislative reforms governing how livestock are managed and processed for consumption, prion diseases are far less prevalent today.
Evgenia defended her PhD without the next job lined up. Sitting in the audience was an unfamiliar professor who approached her afterward. Her work, he said, might be of interest to a lab in Belgium. This was Dr. Bart De Strooper’s lab at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research, one of the world's leading groups for Alzheimer's disease research. He offered to make an introduction. A few days later, an unexpected email arrived from the De Strooper lab inviting her for an interview. Evgenia was nervous interviewing for such a highly regarded lab, and left the interview convinced she wouldn’t be offered a position. Despite these doubts, she landed the job.
The De Strooper lab was an exceptional environment. Evgenia describes arriving there with something close to disbelief at the concentration of scientific talent around her. While she was excited to delve into research on memory loss, the scientific approaches were completely new to her. She was entering the world of microRNAs, a class of small noncoding RNA molecules. Their role in the cell is one of balance: maintaining homeostasis by fine-tuning the output of complex regulatory networks. Although microRNAs are never translated into proteins, they act as potent regulators of gene expression, simultaneously targeting dozens of different messenger RNAs and modulating entire biological pathways at once. A senior postdoc in the De Strooper lab had already identified a set of microRNAs that were significantly altered in Alzheimer's disease relative to healthy human brains. Evgenia’s postdoctoral project was based on the hypothesis that these changes weren't merely a reflection of disease, but might be actively driving it. Because microRNAs sit upstream of so many processes, disruption of even a single one could, in principle, destabilize a wide swath of cellular function simultaneously. This multitargeting capacity, Evgenia would come to believe, made them particularly compelling candidates for understanding a disease as molecularly complex as Alzheimer's.
MicroRNAs weren’t the only aspect of her postdoctoral work that was new to her. Evgenia was also handed a new animal model to work with: the zebrafish. Her PI had proposed that the organism might offer a faster and more tractable platform for studying fundamental questions in neurodegeneration—its brain is simpler, its development is rapid, and its genetics are accessible. Evgenia set up the entire zebrafish branch of the lab from scratch, building the protocols and establishing the necessary infrastructure. As she began studying the function of a specific microRNA, miR-132, in neurodegeneration, she kept encountering the same finding: whenever she knocked down this microRNA an unexpected and highly reproducible cellular phenotype emerged. She observed aberrant branching fibers in the spinal cord of these zebrafish, where there is normally an organized segmented arrangement of cells and their arbors. Through desperate PubMed searches for anyone working at the intersection of zebrafish and neurodegeneration, she eventually cold-emailed Dr. Laure Bally-Cuif, a brilliant scientist and extremely generous person, and now department head at Institut Pasteur in Paris, to ask for help. The answer came to them, unexpectedly, through an intensive zebrafish workshop at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, that Evgenia attended. One evening, as the class passed petri dishes of different transgenic zebrafish lines around a dark microscopy room, Evgenia spotted an identical mystery fluorescent pattern as the one she encountered in the lab. With this information, Evgenia realized that these fluorescent cells were not mature neurons. They were radial glial cells, which are neural stem cells, the progenitors from which new neurons are born. She had set out to study the degeneration of existing neurons in disease and had instead landed, entirely by accident, in the biology of new neuron generation. From neurodegeneration, Evgenia crossed over to neurogenesis. It was the beginning of a significant conceptual reorientation, and the scientific foundation on which her independent research program would eventually be built.
After five years as a postdoc, Evgenia transitioned into a staff scientist role in the same lab, providing her with a more senior position that came with greater responsibility, but still not complete scientific independence. She stayed another five years. The postdoc and staff scientist period, she reflects, while an invaluable ‘school’, also carried a distinct kind of stress—not the acute deadline of a thesis defense, but a slow and diffuse accumulation of uncertainty, the sense of a bottleneck tightening as time moves forward without a clear resolution point. When the move toward independence finally came, it followed the same serendipitous path as her prior career transition. Evgenia gave a talk at a conference, and someone (Dr. Paul Lucassen, who would turn out to be a new mentor to her) approached her afterward about an open group leader position at an institute in the Netherlands. She applied, was invited to interview, and left convinced she wasn't going to get it. She came in second. Then the first candidate couldn't take the position. She got the call.
Today, Evgenia leads her own research group at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam, a team of talented young scientists and caring human beings. Her lab works at the intersection she arrived at through a decade of unexpected pivots from neurodegeneration to microRNAs and neurogenesis, asking how these small regulatory molecules shape the birth and function of new neurons, and how their disruption might contribute to the progression of Alzheimer's disease. Part of what draws Evgenia to this question is an observation that sits slightly outside of conventional disease biology: a meaningful proportion of elderly people carry Alzheimer's pathology in their brains, including the plaques, tangles, and molecular hallmarks, and yet remain cognitively intact. What protects them? The phenomenon of cognitive resilience suggests that pathology and symptoms are not inevitably linked, and that somewhere in the gap between the two lies something worth understanding.
As a group leader, Evgenia treats everything as a learning opportunity, consistently humbled by how much remains unknown, and continually surprised by and grateful for the researchers and trainees around her. Although her journey has included a number of ‘happy accidents’, Evgenia is careful not to over-credit luck. The randomness is real, but so is everything that made her ready for it. "This is you, this is your effort, this is your approach, this is your mentality," she says, "...and somehow this will lead you to where you want to be, even if at the moment it's unclear in your head." A career built not on a fixed destination, but on paying close attention to unexpected data, to paths revealed along the way, and to the pursuit of the funky phenotype.
Find out more about Evgenia and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Margarida’s full interview with Evgenia on November 27, 2025 below!
