Associate Professor Kaylene Young received her PhD from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, studying the properties and function of adult neural stem cells. In pursuing these research questions further as a postdoctoral fellow at University College London (UK), Kaylene became increasingly interested in immature cells known as oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs), and initiated research to investigate their function in the adult brain. She discovered that OPCs generate significant numbers of myelinating oligodendrocytes in adulthood, including cells that contribute to remyelination following injury. Kaylene is Theme Leader for the Neurodegenerative Disease and Brain Injury Research Theme at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research in Tasmania, and her Glial Research Team uses an array of transgenic mouse lines in combination with human stem cell lines, to study the relationship between neuronal activity, OPC behaviour and myelination, as they work to develop novel neural repair strategies for demyelinating diseases, such as Multiple Sclerosis.