A doctoral student at Harvard University, Irina Serbanescu has maintained an affiliation with the institution since first enrolling there in 1999. Ms. Serbanescu pursued undergraduate studies in Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard College, graduating magna cum laude in 2003. She began her work in neuroscience in the summer of 2000 as a research assistant with The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. In this capacity, Irina Serbanescu studied the effect of the cholesterol-lowering drug Lovastatin on atypical absence seizures. Ms. Serbanescu continued to research neurology-related issues with The Hospital for Sick Children throughout her time as an undergraduate at Harvard. She also served as a research assistant at Harvard from 2000 to 2001, focusing on homing endonuclease enzyme activity. Irina Serbanescu’s undergraduate research activities resulted in the publication of several coauthored papers in journals such as Nucleic Acids Research, Annals of Neurology, and the Journal of Lipid Research.

In 2003, Irina Serbanescu entered the Queen’s University School of Medicine in Kingston, Ontario. From 2004 to 2005, Ms. Serbanescu served as a National Officer for Research Exchange with the Canadian Federation of Medical Students. In summer 2005, she engaged in research at The Hospital for Sick Children, characterizing an animal model of ocular injury in non-accidental head trauma.

In the fall of 2005, Irina Serbanescu took an extended break from the Queen’s University School of Medicine to pursue graduate studies in neuroscience at Harvard University. Her work included a project at Children’s Hospital Boston, through which Ms. Serbanescu co-authored the “Genetics of Strabismus” chapter in Albert & Jakobiec’s Principles & Practice of Ophthalmology, 3rd edition.

Returning to her medical studies in Kingston in 2007, Irina Serbanescu earned her M.D. from the School of Medicine at Queen’s University in 2009. She returned to her neuroscience graduate studies at Harvard University later that year, focusing on molecular signals that guide neurons to form specific synapses in the retinas and brains of mammals. A veteran teaching fellow in subjects such as inorganic and organic chemistry, chemical biology, and the neurobiology of behavior, Irina Serbanescu received a Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching in 2010.