Rita Sattler, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Translational Neuroscience and the David and Weezie Chair of Neurodegeneration Research at the Barrow Neurological Institute (BNI), Phoenix, AZ. Sattler is the director of the BNI Education Programs and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Neuroscience at BNI-ASU. She received her master’s and doctoral degrees in neurophysiology from the University of Toronto in Canada. Sattler completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD.

She then served as lead scientist for a startup biotech company, overseeing assay development and drug screening of lead compounds for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). From there, Sattler joined the Johns Hopkins University Drug Discovery Center, strengthening her expertise in preclinical drug development. With this strong translational neuroscience background, Sattler joined the Department of Neurology as assistant professor at JHU, followed by her relocation to the BNI in 2015. Sattler is a member of the American Society for Neuroscience and the American Society for Neurochemistry.

She is the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the Governor’s Gold Medal for the highest academic achievement in graduate studies at the University of Toronto, a Human Frontier Science Program Long-Term Fellowship, and a Howard Hughes Postdoctoral Fellowship. She currently serves as a grant reviewer for several national and international disease foundations and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Sattler’s research focuses on mechanisms of synaptic dysfunction in dementias, including frontotemporal dementia (FTD), FTD with motor neuron dysfunction (FTD/ALS), Alzheimer’s disease, and Lewy body dementia, using human disease models, including postmortem autopsy tissues and induced pluripotent stem cells differentiated into neurons and glial cells.

Sattler is principal investigator and co-investigator of numerous active grants from the NIH/National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the Department of Defense, and several disease foundations, including the Muscular Dystrophy Association and the Robert Packard Center for ALS Research.