Irina Victorovna Gannushkina

Irina Victorovna Gannushkina had a lifelong interest in experimental neurology. Her fundamental studies of collateral blood circulation in the brain, individual susceptibility to cerebral ischaemia, and cerebrovascular biomechanics opened new perspectives for neurology and neurosurgery clinics. She also studied neuroimmunology and demonstrated the role of autoimmune factor in the pathogenesis of stroke, traumatic brain injury, and other nervous diseases. She wrote Collateral Cerebral Blood Circulation (1973) and Immunological Aspects of Traumatic and Vascular Brain Lesions (1974) and coauthored Hypertonic Encephalopathy (1987) and Immunopathology of Traumatic Brain Injury (1996).

Irina Gannushkina was born in Moscow in 1929 into a medical family (her father was a neurologist and her mother a nurse). As a student in the paediatric faculty of the Stalin Moscow State Medical Institute N2, she became interested in pathology and spent four years at the students' society of the chair of pathology (in many departments in medical schools there are voluntary circles or societies for those students who are interested in the subject; they normally get together once a month during term; at these meetings, guided by a head of the chair (professor) or by …