Micaelly Alves, PhD Candidate
2025 Toffler Scholar | Neuroscience, Temple University
Biography
Micaelly Alves grew up between two worlds. Born in Philadelphia to a Brazilian family, she spent much of her childhood moving between the United States and Brazil, shifting languages, schools, and cultures as her parents searched for connection and belonging. Those early years, split between continents, gave her both independence and curiosity. Even as a child, she asked questions, learned new languages, and tried to understand how people and systems adapt across environments.
“I was always curious,” Alves says. “I just wanted to understand how things worked.”
That curiosity took on deeper meaning when Alzheimer’s disease entered her family. Alves’ grandmother lived with the disease for sixteen years, a long and painful trajectory that left a lasting imprint. During the years Alves spent in Brazil, she spoke often with her grandmother, fascinated and unsettled by the way memory and identity slipped away.
“I was watching this woman who everyone described as brilliant and vibrant,” Alves recalls, “and she didn’t even know who she was anymore.”
That experience transformed curiosity into purpose.
Biography
Micaelly Alves grew up between two worlds. Born in Philadelphia to a Brazilian family, she spent much of her childhood moving between the United States and Brazil, shifting languages, schools, and cultures as her parents searched for connection and belonging. Those early years, split between continents, gave her both independence and curiosity. Even as a child, she asked questions, learned new languages, and tried to understand how people and systems adapt across environments.
“I was always curious,” Alves says. “I just wanted to understand how things worked.”
That curiosity took on deeper meaning when Alzheimer’s disease entered her family. Alves’ grandmother lived with the disease for sixteen years, a long and painful trajectory that left a lasting imprint. During the years Alves spent in Brazil, she spoke often with her grandmother, fascinated and unsettled by the way memory and identity slipped away.
“I was watching this woman who everyone described as brilliant and vibrant,” Alves recalls, “and she didn’t even know who she was anymore.”
That experience transformed curiosity into purpose.
Research Focus
When Alves arrived at Temple University as an undergraduate, she planned to pursue a career in medicine. She studied neuroscience and worked in a hospital setting with geriatric patients, drawn to both biology and patient care. But everything changed when she joined Dr. Silvia Fossati’s lab as a research assistant. There, she worked closely with her postdoctoral mentor, Dr. Elisa Canepa, and discovered something she had not anticipated: she loved the process of discovery itself.
“I realized I didn’t just want to treat disease,” Alves says. “I wanted to understand what caused it.”
Today, Alves studies Alzheimer’s disease and cerebral amyloid angiopathy from an innovative angle, focusing on microRNAs, tiny transcriptional signals in the bloodstream that mirror brain activity and could revolutionize early detection.
Her work focuses on microRNAs, short strands of non-protein coding RNAs, that act as molecular regulators. Although tiny, microRNAs influence entire biological pathways. Alves concentrates on two in particular, miR-212 and miR-132, which play roles in both cardiovascular health and neurodegeneration.
What makes these molecules especially exciting is how they move. Cells package microRNAs inside extracellular vesicles and release them into the bloodstream, protecting them from degradation. That makes them detectable in blood samples.
“This raises the possibility that routine blood tests could provide a window into changes occurring in the brain,”
- Micaelly Alves
In Dr. Fossati's lab, Alves now studies how these microRNAs change as amyloid accumulates in the brain vasculature, a process closely linked to Alzheimer’s disease progression. By analyzing blood samples alongside brain tissue, Alves aims to build a panel of circulating biomarkers that can detect Alzheimer’s disease and cerebral amyloid angiopathy before irreversible damage occurs.
The urgency behind this work reflects a growing understanding of how Alzheimer’s truly unfolds. Very few patients develop pure Alzheimer’s pathology, which is characterized by the accumulation of amyloid plaques and tau tangles. Most experience a combination of plaques, tangles, vascular damage, neuroinflammation, and more. Cerebral amyloid angiopathy, in which amyloid builds up around blood vessels, causes microbleeds and impairs the clearance of toxic proteins.
“If we wait until symptoms appear,” Alves says, “the vasculature is already compromised, and even the most effective treatments may do more harm than good.”
Alves believes microRNA biomarkers could identify amyloid buildup around blood vessels long before symptoms appear, and before scans detect disease, enabling early intervention to prevent neurodegeneration.
Supported by the Toffler Scholar Award, Alves is pioneering a new biomarker study, enabling her to validate microRNA panels and advance early-detection methods.
“This kind of funding lets a young scientist do something truly new,” Alves says. “It gives me space to build something that doesn’t exist yet.”
For Alves, the award also carries symbolic weight. It affirms that basic biology still matters, even in a field dominated by late-stage clinical trials.
“If we don’t understand the biology,” she says, “we’ll never solve the disease.”
As she moves through the most critical years of her PhD, Alves stands at the intersection of molecular biology, neuroscience, and precision medicine. Her work bridges basic science and clinical reality, linking RNA regulation inside cells to the lived experience of families watching memory disappear.
She also brings a global perspective to her work, shaped by a childhood of movement, language, and cultural exchange. That perspective makes her especially attuned to how diseases unfold differently across populations and environments.
“I think growing up between countries and cultures teaches you that nothing is certain,” she says. “Biology operates under the same principle.”
Looking ahead, Alves hopes her biomarker work will help shift Alzheimer’s research upstream, toward prevention and resilience rather than crisis management. By detecting vascular and molecular changes earlier, she believes scientists can finally intervene before cognitive decline takes hold.
For her, the mission remains deeply personal.
“Losing my grandmother to this disease shaped why I do this work,” Alves says. “If earlier detection can spare someone that experience, it matters deeply.”