Dilek Colak is an associate professor of neuroscience at the Brain and Mind Research Institute-Center for Neurogenetics of Weill Cornell Medicine. She received her Ph.D. from Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich under Magdalena Götz and was a postdoctoral fellow with Samie Jaffrey at Weill Cornell Medicine. During her Ph.D. studies, she showed that a key aspect of the adult neurogenic niche is to suppress glial fate in neural stem cells. During her postdoctoral studies, she focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying ASD as well as on RNA regulatory pathways during nervous system development. She identified fragile X syndrome, the most common inherited form of intellectual disability, as a disease caused by a fundamentally novel type of RNA-directed gene silencing. She became a faculty member at Weill Cornell Medicine in 2015.
Research in the Colak lab focuses on understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions. Specifically, the lab models diverse types of ASD using transgenic mouse models and stem cells from autistic individuals to investigate glial cell influence on neuronal connectivity. Another major focus of the lab’s research is RNA regulation, specifically degradation and translation pathways, and its contribution to synaptic plasticity and cognition in health and disease. By strategically combining human stem cell culturing with transplantation techniques to determine disease-specific properties inherent to ASD-derived astrocytes, the lab demonstrated that ASD astrocytes induce repetitive behavior as well as impair memory and long-term potentiation when transplanted into healthy mouse brains. Transplanted ASD astrocytes also exhibited exaggerated calcium fluctuations in the host brains.
The Colak lab employs a multidisciplinary research program that incorporates genetic mouse models, human-derived stem cell models, single-cell RNA-sequencing, behavioral assays, electrophysiology and two-photon calcium imaging to study cellular and molecular mechanisms in neurotypical brains as well as neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions.
