Maia Kokoeva
Dr. Maia Kokoeva is an Associate Professor of Medicine at 海角社区 in the Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism. She completed her undergraduate studies at the Department of Biology, Lomonosov Moscow State University and obtained her Ph.D. degree from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. During her first postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried/Munich, Germany, under the supervision of Dr. Dieter Oesterhelt, she investigated sensory signal transduction in the archaeon Halobacterium salinarum. By employing molecular genetic techniques in conjunction with behavioral analysis, she uncovered the signaling pathways that mediate the chemotactic responses to a variety of chemical attractants including several amino acids. She then joined the laboratory of Dr. Jeffrey Flier at Harvard Medical School to continue her postdoctoral training with a focus on central regulation of energy balance in the mammals. Dr. Kokoeva was intrigued by the observation that obese rodents and humans treated with the neuropeptide ciliary neurotrophic factor (CNTF) show a reduction in body weight that is sustained well beyond termination of treatment, a phenomenon not seen with any other weight lowering drug. In an attempt to elucidate the mechanistic basis for this effect, she discovered that CNTF potently stimulates neurogenesis in adult hypothalamic structures that are important for the regulation of energy balance.