Virginia Gao, M.D., Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medicine and a board-certified Neurologist with the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Dr. Gao offers individualized, compassionate care to patients with Movement Disorders with a focus on Parkinson’s disease. Her research interest is in the gut-brain axis and she is the principal investigator for an ongoing clinical trial for biomarker discovery in Parkinson’s disease.

In addition to her clinical work and research, she is Co-Director for the Area of Concentration in Neurodegeneration for medical students, and Associate Program Director for Research for the Neurology Residency Program.

Dr. Gao received her B.A. in Neuroscience from Columbia and her M.D. and Ph.D. from Mount Sinai. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. She completed her residency in Neurology at Weill Cornell, where she served as Chief Resident, and her fellowship training in Movement Disorders at Weill Cornell and the Neurological Institute of New York at Columbia. Her work has been funded by the National Institute of Health, the Leon Levy Foundation, the McGraw Fellowship in Neurology Research, and the American Academy for Neurology.

Select Publications

Gao V, Crawford CV, Burré J. The Gut-Brain Axis in Parkinson's Disease. Cold Spring Harb Perspect Med. 2025 Jan 7;15(1):a041618.

Gao V, Chlebowicz J, Gaskin K, Briano JA, Komer LE, Pineda A, Jhalani S, Ahmad S, Uwaifo E, Black LS, Haller JE, Przedborski S, Lane DA, Zhang S, Sharma M, Burré J. Synaptic vesicle-omics in mice captures signatures of aging and synucleinopathy. Nat Commun. 2025 May 1;16(1):4079.

Keavney JL, Mathur S, Schroeder K, Merrell R, Castillo-Torres SA, Gao V, Crotty GF, Schwarzschild MA, Poma JM. Perspectives of People At-Risk on Parkinson's Prevention Research. J Parkinsons Dis. 2024;14(3):399-414.

Smith EE, Biessels GJ, Gao V, Gottesman RF, Liesz A, Parikh NS, Iadecola C. Systemic determinants of brain health in ageing. Nat Rev Neurol. 2024 Nov;20(11):647-659.