Magdalini Polymenidou is Associate Professor of Biomedicine at the Department of Quantitative Biomedicine of the University of Zurich (UZH). She is an expert on protein aggregation, prions and prion-like phenomena, as well as RNA-binding protein biology. She joined UZH as an Assistant Professor in 2013 and since then, she has been leading a research team focusing on the molecular mechanisms of ALS and FTD. The team focuses on the formation and properties of the physiological and pathological states of TDP-43, FUS and the dipeptide repeat proteins, combining structural and biochemical analyses with cellular assays and animal models.

Originally trained as a pharmacist in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), she did her PhD on prion diseases in the laboratory of Adriano Aguzzi at the University Hospital of Zurich (Switzerland). As a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Don Cleveland at the University of California in San Diego (USA), she used genome-wide approaches to understand the function of TDP-43 and FUS. Among other honors, she was awarded the ERC Consolidator Grant (2022), the Franco Regli Prize (2019), the EMBO Young Investigator Award (2018), the Georg-Friedrich Götz Prize (2015), the SNSF Professorship (2013), the HFSP Career Development Award (2013) and the NIH Pathway to Independence Award (2011). She is one of the 2022 Novartis Institute for Biological Research (NIBR) Global Scholars.