Bio
Dr. Ruqayya Afridi is a neuroscientist specializing in glial biology, neuroinflammation, and neurodegenerative disorders. She earned her Ph.D. in Pharmacology from Kyungpook National University, where her research focused on microglial immunometabolism in stress-related disorders. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Brain Center in Guangzhou, China. Dr. Afridi has over eight years of research experience in neuroimmune mechanisms, animal models, and molecular neuroscience, and has authored more than 20 peer-reviewed publications. Her research interests focus on glial cell biology, neuroinflammation, and the development of novel therapeutic strategies for neurological diseases. She also serves as a reviewer for several international neuroscience journals and actively promotes scientific collaboration and knowledge exchange within the neuroscience community.

Bio
Marie-Ève Tremblay is a Canadian neuroscientist and academic at the University of Victoria. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2009 when microglia, resident immune cells of the brain, had unknown functions in the absence of pathological challenge. Her research has contributed to stimulating a paradigm shift in neuroscience and neuroimmunology by revealing that microglia are always active, playing beneficial roles in the healthy brain, that can also become pathological in disease. This research has involved the supervision of over 125 undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postdoctoral fellows, and research assistants or associates. Dr. Tremblay has been invited to present her research over 200 times as seminars and lectures in symposia, specialized courses and workshops, with a majority on the international level. She has over 250 publications, not including preprints, that were cited over 23,000 times, corresponding to an h-index of 74 (Google Scholar). In 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025, Clarivate ranked her among the top 1% of most highly cited researchers cross-fields. She is the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Neurobiology of Healthy Cognitive Aging and an Elected College Member of the Royal Society of Canada. She is also Editor-in-Chief of the recently launched Glial Health Research journal published by Elsevier, and former Specialty Chief Editor of the Non-Neuronal Cells section of Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience. Her research program investigates the outcomes of genetic variants and modifiable risk factors for disease on microglial health along an aging trajectory.

Bio
Dr. Ruqayya Afridi is a neuroscientist specializing in glial biology, neuroinflammation, and neurodegenerative disorders. She earned her Ph.D. in Pharmacology from Kyungpook National University, where her research focused on microglial immunometabolism in stress-related disorders. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Brain Center in Guangzhou, China. Dr. Afridi has over eight years of research experience in neuroimmune mechanisms, animal models, and molecular neuroscience, and has authored more than 20 peer-reviewed publications. Her research interests focus on glial cell biology, neuroinflammation, and the development of novel therapeutic strategies for neurological diseases. She also serves as a reviewer for several international neuroscience journals and actively promotes scientific collaboration and knowledge exchange within the neuroscience community.