Dr Foa arrived at the University in November 2001. She graduated from Deakin University in 1996 and then spent 5 years in the US, working at the University of Michigan and then at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Outside of work, Dr Foa is an avid pilot and cruising sailor.
Research Interests
The brain is probably the most sophisticated of all electrical circuits, yet the precise mechanisms of how it is wired together remains a mystery. Dr Foa’s research centres on this question, and uses a combination of state of the art molecular biology and time lapse imaging techniques to study nervous system development. She is particularly interested in the multitude of newly discovered genes and their role in brain wiring. By expressing a gene of interest within selected neurons as they grow within their natural environment or in the artificial environment of a dish, she assesses the role of a gene in controlling neuronal development and function within the embryonic, adult and aging brain
Research Areas:Teaching
Dr Foa teaches both Pharmacology and Neuroscience. Her prime responsibility is second year Pharmacology for the medical students. She is involved with teaching the Neuroscience component in first year Human Biology and also teaches in the 3rd year Biomedical Neuroscience course, where she introduces students to the studies of specific gene function within the nervous system. Dr Foa also takes Honours students in her lab to do intensive Neuroscience research.
Selected Publications:- Foa, L. C., and Cooke, I. R. C. , 1998, 'The ontogeny of GABA- and glutamate-like immunohistochemistry in the embryonic Australian freshwater crayfish, Cherax destructor', Dev. Brain Res, 107, pgs. 33-42
- Haas, K., Jensen, K., Sin, W. C., Foa, L., Cline H. T. , 2002, 'Targeted electroporation in Xenopus tadpoles in vivo - from single cells to the entire brain. ', Differentiation, 70, pgs. 148-154
- Foa, L., Rajan, I., Haas, K., Wu, G.-Y, Brakeman, P., Worley, P. F., Cline, H. , 2001, 'The Scaffold Proteins, Homer1b/c regulates axon pathfinding in the central nervous system in vivo', Nature Neurosci, 4, pgs. 499-506
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