Elis is an electrophysiologist, research scientist, neuroscientist, Professor of Physiology.
Background
Elise obtained her Bachelor (1973) and D. (1976) at the University of East Anglia, England before moving to Maryland, USA to complete her training in basic Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins Medical school Dept. Neurology. After 3 years as an Assistant Professor she joined the Biophysical Laboratory NINCDS, NIH Bethesda Md. During 15 productive years she rose to GS-15 and head of the Synaptic Mechanisms Section NINDS. In 1999 she was recruited to head the Cellular Mechanisms Division, with over 150 members, at the newly restructured Toronto Western Research Institute, UHN and as a full professor of Physiology University of Toronto. Elise retired in 2019 as Professor Emerita, University of Toronto. Elise was elected into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars in 2015.
Career
Elise made numerous contributions to fundamental and clinical neuroscience. With DB Drachman she demonstrated that postsynaptic receptor degradation is abnormally accelerated at intact neuromuscular junctions with myasthenia gravis antibodies (Science 78). Later in her own lab she turned her attention to the physiology of the poorly understood presynaptic nerve terminal. Her first major contribution was to develop the first calyx-type nerve terminal for direct voltage clamp analysis of ion currents with direct recording of calcium currents (BR89, PNAS 90, JNeurosci 91). She then used this preparation to record directly from the presynaptic terminal release face and analyze single V-sensitive calcium channel activity (Neuron 91). The culmination of this work was to demonstrated that a single calcium channel could gate the release of a single transmitter-filled synaptic vesicle (Neuron 93, TINS 16). Although these conclusions were disputed for a number of years they have since been generally accepted.
