Debbie McKenzie is a Professor at the University of Alberta. She is a prion biologist at the Centre for Prions and Protein Folding Diseases at the University of Alberta. Her primary interest is the generation and maintenance of prion strains with a focus on Chronic Wasting Disease. She is funded by the Alberta Prion Research Institute, Genome Canada Genome Alberta, and NSERC Discovery and Alliance grants. Her laboratory is focused on two different research areas: prion disease with a specific focus on chronic wasting disease (CWD) and mtDNA deletion abnormalities and aging.