Markita Landry, one of the three recipients of the inaugural CITRIS Innovation Fellowships and AIC Awards, has been named a 2025 fellow by the Guggenheim Foundation.
Landry takes a two-pronged approach to her research: She examines neurochemical signaling in the brain to illuminate the mechanisms of psychiatric and neurodegenerative conditions, while also investigating how to deliver outside components, including tools for genetic modifications, to plant cells. She received support from CITRIS and the Banatao Institute for the latter topic, a project that centers on investigating nanotechnology strategies to precisely deliver nucleic acids and proteins to plant germline tissue, a potentially quick and cost-efficient method to correct genetic orders and introduce desirable traits early on.
With the Guggenheim, she plans to combine her separate research pursuits for the first time to understand how compounds extracted from plants used in Indigenous Bolivian medicine might function as treatments for nervous system disorders. She has already traveled to Bolivia’s high plateau, working with local Indigenous communities to collect plant samples, and will use imaging techniques developed in her lab to see how molecules isolated from Andean plants affect brain chemistry.