Dr. Gabriela Bodea completed her PhD in the laboratory of Prof. Sandra Blaess at the University of Bonn, Germany in 2014. Dr. Bodea's PhD work was focused on understanding the developmental mechanisms leading to neuronal diversity in the mammalian brain. In June 2014, Dr. Bodea joined the Genome Plasticity and Disease group at Mater Research Institute – University of Queensland, Australia where she began to study how LINE-1 retrotransposons, a class of mobile DNA elements colloquially refered as "jumping genes", may affect neuronal genome and potentially contribute to neurological disease. This work has been supported by a German Research Foundation (DFG) fellowship and an NHMRC-ARC Dementia Research Development Fellowship. Dr. Bodea's work is currently focused on investigating the functional impact of LINE-1 retrotransposon activity on specific subpopulations of neurons in the brain.