Sila Ultanir

Sila earned her BSc from Bilkent University in Turkey and completed her PhD in Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University, USA, under the mentorship of Dr. Rafael Yuste. Her doctoral research focused on dendritic spine morphogenesis during development. As a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Anirvan Ghosh’s lab at UCSD, she studied the role of NMDA receptors in synaptogenesis. She further trained with Dr. Yuh-Nung Jan at UCSF, collaborating with Dr. Kevan Shokat to investigate the role of kinases in neuronal development.

In 2013, Sila established her research lab at the MRC-funded National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) at Mill Hill, London, which later became part of the Francis Crick Institute. Her lab integrates expertise in neurodevelopment, kinases, and mass spectrometry to study brain disease-associated kinases.

Her current research focuses on the kinase CDKL5, whose mutations cause CDKL5 Deficiency Disorder (CDD), a rare neurodevelopmental condition. Her lab has made significant discoveries, including identifying substrates phosphorylated by CDKL5 and their biological functions in mouse models (Baltussen et al., 2018; Sampedro-Castaneda et al., 2023). They also demonstrated that CDKL2 can compensate for CDKL5 substrate phosphorylation in the mouse brain (Silvestre et al., 2024).

Sila’s lab has contributed to translational research for CDD therapies, developing EB2 phosphorylation as a preclinical biomarker for CDKL5 activity, now used in both academia and industry. Their findings propose CDKL2 activation and Cav2.3 suppression as potential therapeutic strategies for CDD.

Sila collaborates closely with the Loulou Foundation, which supports the advancement of therapies for CDD. Her lab was recognized with the Lab of the Year awards in 2018 and 2023 at the foundation’s annual CDKL5 Forums.