Aleksandra Deczkowska

Aleksandra Deczkowska is a Researcher and Principal Investigator at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, affiliated with the Computational Structural Biology unit. She leads a dynamic research team investigating the critical interactions between the immune system and the brain, with a focus on neuroimmunology, brain aging, and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. Her work integrates cutting-edge genomic technologies to decode immune-brain communication in both health and disease.

Her research focuses on understanding how immune cells, particularly microglia and dendritic cells, regulate brain physiology, maintenance, and development. She explores the systemic nature of diseases like Alzheimer's and investigates how peripheral immune signals influence brain function. Her lab is actively involved in projects on brain maintenance 24/7, immune-brain communication in postnatal development, and the systemic aspects of Alzheimer's disease.

Dr. Deczkowska's recent publications appear in top-tier journals including Nature, Nature Medicine, Immunity, and Nature Reviews Immunology, reflecting her significant contributions to immunology and neuroscience. Her work spans neuroimmunology, systems biology, genomics, and cellular immunity, often revealing novel mechanisms of immune regulation in the central nervous system and liver.

Selected Scientific Contributions:

• Elucidating the role of microglial plasticity in brain aging
• Identifying XCR1+ dendritic cells as drivers of liver inflammation in metabolic disease
• Revealing how NASH impairs cancer immunotherapy
• Characterizing immune cells in the choroid plexus
• Investigating meningeal immune responses in spinal cord pathologies

She mentors a team of postdoctoral fellows, PhD students, and research engineers, fostering the next generation of scientists in the field of neuroimmunology. Her laboratory is at the forefront of integrating systems-level approaches to understand complex immune-brain interactions, with implications for treating neurodegenerative and metabolic diseases.