Rate My Professor Mckaila Leytze

Mckaila Leytze serves as Assistant Research Fellow in the Department of Surgery and Critical Care at the University of Otago, Wellington, within the Division of Health Sciences and the School of Medicine and Health Sciences. Her professional career includes prior roles in neuroscience research environments. She joined the Stewart and Shi Lab at the University of Washington Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology as a Research Scientist in December 2019, focusing on the isolation of brain-derived extracellular vesicles from plasma using immunoprecipitation techniques.

Leytze earned her Bachelor's degree in Behavioral Neuroscience from Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, where she is originally from Seattle. During her undergraduate studies, she worked in Dr. Kelly Jantzen's psychology laboratory investigating motor sequence planning and human cognition through electroencephalography (EEG) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). She also conducted research in the biology department under Dr. Lina Dahlberg, examining the role of the endoplasmic reticulum-associated degradation (ERAD) system in neurodegenerative protein aggregate diseases, including Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. She subsequently completed a Master's of Science degree in Neuropathology at the University of Sheffield in England, with her thesis addressing the pathological overlap between amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Leytze has co-authored several peer-reviewed publications in neuroscience, including 'Enhancer-AAVs allow genetic access to oligodendrocytes and astrocytes' (eLife, 2025), 'Integrated multimodal cell atlas of Alzheimer's disease' (Nature Neuroscience, 2024), 'Cross-species consensus atlas of the primate basal ganglia' (bioRxiv, 2025), and 'Preferential attention to same- and other-ethnicity infant faces' (Ethology, 2020). Her contributions appear in association with institutions such as the Allen Institute for Brain Science.