Tatyana Strekalova

Tatyana Strekalova is a Clinician Scientist at the Department of Psychiatry and Neuropsychology, University of Maastricht. She is also Professor of Physiology at Sechenov 1st Moscow State Medical University, Moscow.

The research interests of Tatyana Strekalova concern the neurobiology and neuropharmacology of affective disorders resulting from stress, aging, and inflammatory disease. She is also interested in the impact of diet on behaviour and how genetic susceptibilities to affective disorders may be triggered. In particular, she is interested in the behaviours associated with  deficiencies in 5-HT synthesis and transporter function. She described the first animal model that identified the existence and molecular basis of individual resilience to stress-induced anhedonia. In addition, Tatyana Strekalova has worked with animal models of neurodegenerative pathologies, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and models of ganglioside deficiency, to identify the causes of the subtle early behavioural changes. In a course of these studies, she has investigated the impact of new pharmacological interventions that target glutamatergic systems, insulin receptors, ROS generation and inflammatory pathways. Tatyana Strekalova’s discoveries in the field of the inflammatory mechanisms of stress resilience and substantially has led to a substantial improvement and efficacy of translational and screening methods in the field of modeling depression and the discovery of new antidepressants. Tatyana Strekalova’s research has led to major advances in the neurobiology of stress resilience and related disease mechanisms in biological psychiatry, and, based on these mechanisms, to the discovery of several new experimental therapies for these conditions.

In 2003, Tatyana Strekalova received funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) to build her own group. Over the years her research has been supported by Deutsche Akademische Austausch Dienst (DAAD), Federation of European Biochemical Society (FEBS, European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), Tempus/Erasmus European foundation, Russian Foundation of Basic Research, Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology (FCT), Internationale Stichting Alzheimer Onderzoek (ISAO): International Foundation on Alzheimer’s disease research, the Netherlands, NARSAD The Brain and Behavior Research Fund, USA. Recently, she coordinated and led the FP7 and Horizon 2020 work packages of “Aggressotype” (2013-2018), “Eat2beNice” (2018-2023), and “PhytoAPP” (2020-2025) Consortia. She has also served as a reviewer for numerous European Research Foundations and Scientific journals.

Over the years Tatyana Strekalova has supervised many PhD students. From 2009-2015, she led a programme of International Exchange and training at Lisbon University that was supported by NENS. She currently runs an international PhD exchange and training programme at Sechenov University and a number of these students have spent time working at the Department of Pharmacology in Oxford.