Dr. Nadia (Nadejda) Tsankova is a tenured Professor in Pathology and Neuroscience, and has been part of the research and clinical faculty at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine since 2014. Her lab is located on the beautiful upper east side of Manhattan in New York City.

The main research focus of the Tsankova laboratory is to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms driving aberrant glial proliferation and migration in two debilitating CNS disorders – glioblastoma and epilepsy, focusing on the role of epigenetics and the transcriptional machinery in maintaining these dysfunctional glial phenotypes.  Our primary model is human pathological tissue obtained from neurosurgical resections and perpetuated in the form of spheroids or mouse xenografts. Our lab has developed unique techniques for the acute isolation of viable glial/neural populations in such tissues, using novel markers for cell quiescence and activation.  The lab is actively characterizing, both functionally and molecularly, novel populations of cancer stem cells and pathologically remodeled glial progenitors, in order to obtain deeper mechanistic insight into the role of glial proliferation and migration in CNS disease as well as to discover superior new targets for treatment of glioblastoma and drug-resistant epilepsy. We are using various techniques, such as ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, single cell and bulk RNA-seq, CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing, tissue culture, and orthotopic xenotransplantation, and collaborate with several labs who share our passion for neuro-epigenetics.