Cells Webinar | Rethinking Glia: From Support Cells to Central Players
the chair
26th Cells Webinar
Rethinking Glia: From Support Cells to Central Players
Hello everyone, and a very warm welcome, whether you are joining us from Canada, China, or anywhere else around the world.
You know, there is something wonderful about the story of glial cells. For decades, they sat quietly in the background, labelled as support cells, as the brain's connective tissue, while neurons took centre stage. And then, slowly but surely, the science began to tell a very different story. Astrocytes talking to synapses. Microglia actively patrol and shape neural circuits. Oligodendrocytes do far more than wrap axons. And all of them are deeply implicated in conditions ranging from multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's disease to sleep disorders, chronic pain, and even high blood pressure.
Glial biology is no longer a niche corner of neuroscience. It is one of the most exciting and rapidly evolving fields we have—the research being presented today reflects exactly that energy.
I want to thank the Cells Editorial Office for making this event possible, and most importantly, I want to thank each of you—our speakers and our audience—for being part of this conversation.
Today's webinar brings together researchers who are at the forefront of these discoveries. I encourage all of you to engage, ask questions, and make the most of this opportunity to exchange ideas across disciplines and across borders.
Let us begin.
Dr. Ruqayya Afridi
Guest Editor & Webinar Chair
Date: 16 July 2026
Time: 9:00 am CST Asia | 9:00 pm EDT
Webinar ID: 863 6976 3151
Webinar Secretariat: journal.webinar@mdpi.com
Meet the Event Chair
Meet Our Speakers
Prof. Dr. Marie-Ève Tremblay
University of Victoria, Canada;
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.
Dr. Ruqayya Afridi
Southern Medical University, China;
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.
Sponsors and Partners
Organizer
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 10 December 2026
Edited by: Ruqayya Afridi
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/cells/special_issues/DFO04U0XJE?webinar_id=282&_utm_from=8bd6274e73