Daniel El Kodsi, PhD
During Daniel's scientific training as a neuroscientist, under Dr. Michael Schlossmacher, he focused on the pathogenesis of early-onset parkinsonism. He was able to: (i) investigate the PD pathogenesis and delineate disease mechanisms; (ii) build animal models to restage PD gene-linked neural degeneration; and (i) delineate Parkin-related cellular mechanisms using both cell and protein modelling. These efforts culminated in the discovery of a novel antioxidant function for wild-type parkin in human brain. Transitioning into more clinical work, he focused on COVID-19 research, sero-surveillance and prevalence, under the supervision of Dr. Amy Hsu. As a clinical research program manager he was tasked with: (i) assessing SARS-CoV-2 infection, re-infection, and serious outcomes in Long-Term Care (LTC) sector; (ii) investigating natural and vaccine-induced immunity; and (iii) building prediction models for SARS-CoV-2. This allowed him to harness high-level project management skills.
Sonia Gandhi, PhD
Sonia is a Professor of Neurology at UCL, and a Group Leader at The Francis Crick Institute. She studied the role of PINK1 in autosomal recessive Parkinson's during her PhD, and subsequently established her own laboratory studying the effects of alpha-synuclein oligomerisation in neurons. Her work focuses on the interaction between protein aggregation and mitochondrial dysfunction in human neurons.
Zane Jaunmuktane, MD
Zane Jaunmuktane is a Clinical Lecturer and Honorary Consultant Neuropathologist at the Queen Square Brain Bank for Neurological Disorders and in the Division of Neuropathology, Department of Clinical and Movement Neurosciences, University College London. Together with colleagues, she was the first to demonstrate that under certain circumstances, amyloid-beta pathology is transmissible in humans. Zane's main interest is in the cell-to-cell spreading and regional propagation mechanisms of misfolded proteins and how concomitant pathologies determine disease progression and symptom severity.
Rodger Liddle, MD
Rodger A. Liddle, MD, received his medical degree from Vanderbilt University and postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He has served on the faculties of UCSF and Duke University. At Duke, Dr. Liddle has held numerous leadership positions, including Chief of the Gastroenterology Division. Dr. Liddle’s research focuses on enteroendocrine cell biology and pancreatic pathobiology. His laboratory discovered neuropods that connect enteroendocrine cells to nerves and provide a connection between food and microbes in the gut and the nervous system. He also discovered that enteroendocrine cells contain alpha-synuclein. Dr. Liddle is a member of Alpha Omega Alpha, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and the Association of American Physicians. He has served as Associate Editor of Gastroenterology, the American Journal of Physiology, the Journal of Clinical Investigation, and JCI Insight. He recently received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Pancreatic Association and has also served as its president.
Tina Matos, PhD
Tina is an ASAP project manager in Neurology at Yale University School of Medicine. She worked on neuronal SNAREs for her graduate work at UT Southwestern and the photoreceptor melanopsin as a postdoc as Johns Hopkins University. Most recently, Tina has been working at biotech companies in the greater Boston area.
Oke Avwenagha, PhD
Prior to joining Team Hardy at the end of March 2021 I worked in Research Governance & Management at the Department of Neurodegenerative Disease & MRC Prion Unit, UCL Institute of Neurology. My previous roles were at the Science Funding Division, the Wellcome Trust and the UCL/UCLH R&D Office where I managed a range of clinical, basic and epidemiological research. I obtained my BSc (honours) and PhD in Neuroscience at UCL.
Darren Moore
Darren is Professor and Chair of the Department of Neurodegenerative Science, Van Andel Institute, Michigan. His graduate studies focused on the neuropharmacology of purinergic GPCRs with Piers Emson at the University of Cambridge, and he conducted post-doctoral training on pathophysiological mechanisms of PD with Ted Dawson at Johns Hopkins University .
Alexandra Nelson, MD, PhD
Alexandra Nelson, MD, PhD, is a systems neuroscientist and movement disorders neurologist. Her research is focused on the cellular and circuit bases of motor control, and in particular how these go awry in the context of movement disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease and dyskinesias. She is known for her expertise in ex vivo (slice) and in vivo electrophysiology, as well as her use of optogenetics and other cell type-specific tools. She has made contributions to our understanding of the cellular and circuit mechanisms of motor learning, as well as the function of basal ganglia microcircuits. In the context of disease, her laboratory has identified key basal ganglia physiological correlates of disease symptoms and effective therapies (such as dopamine replacement therapy and deep brain stimulation) in mouse models of Parkinson’s disease.
Weiyi Peng, PhD
Dr. Peng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Houston (UH). She received her PhD in Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX in Immunology. She has explored the underlying mechanisms of immune responses, and has published a series of studies related to cancer and the immune system.
Saadia Rahman, MSc
Saadia stared her academic career studying the molecular genetics of cancer at Brunel University, UK, which she took to Masters level also at Brunel. She worked in the field for a short time before switching to clinical research in 2010. She stayed on this track, consequently migrating to academic and clinical research management. She went onto further her skills and experience taking on projects and programmes of work in drug development, research operations and now to a larger project management role.
James Surmeier, PhD
D. James Surmeier, PhD, is the Nathan Smith Davis Professor and Chair of the Department of Neuroscience at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. He studied mathematics as an undergraduate at the University of Idaho and received his PhD in Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington. He pioneered the use of advanced electrophysiological, optical, and molecular approaches to unravel the roles of dopamine and acetylcholine in modulating the striatal circuitry implicated in Parkinson’s disease. These studies have yielded fundamental insights into how striatal circuits adapt to the disease and how they contribute to side-effects of symptomatic treatment. In addition, Dr. Surmeier’s group has made a significant contribution to our understanding of how the physiology of dopaminergic neurons leads to the mitochondrial oxidant stress implicated in Parkinson’s disease pathogenesis. These studies have served as a foundation for large-scale clinical trials aimed at slowing Parkinson’s disease progression.
Julianna Tomlinson, PhD
Upon completion of her PhD in Biochemistry (uOttawa), Julianna joined Dr. Michael Schlossmacher’s team to focus on PD related topics. She has created a mouse model to study the interaction between mutant Gba1 and SNCA in vivo (manuscript is in preparation). In parallel efforts, Julianna and colleagues refined a method for the visualization of the olfactory system in mice. This publication highlights the abundance of a-synuclein within the olfactory epithelium and also showed that Snca protects mice against nasal inoculation with a neurotropic virus and lessens the bacterial load in sepsis (Tomlinson et al., JNT 2017). Julianna has been supported as co-PI on grants from the MJFF, Weston Brain Institute and the Canadian Institute of Health Research. In her current role as Sr. Research Associate and Scientific Project Manager in the Schlossmacher team, she contributes to project conception, design and implementation, to overseeing graduate students and is leading scientific projects.
YuHong Fu, PhD
YuHong is a senior research fellow at the Brain and Mind Center of the University of Sydney, specializing in human neuropathology and the molecular mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative disease. She brings advanced histopathology expertise and extensive experience analyzing postmortem human and rodent brain tissue. Her research focuses on selective neuronal vulnerability and glial pathogenic pathways in synucleinopathies.
Xiqun Chen
Xiqun is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Chen received her medical and PhD degrees and residency training from Shanghai Medical College, Fudan University. She then completed her postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University. Dr. Chen joined Massachusetts General Hospital and established her research program focusing on Parkinson’s - cancer associations as a basis for better understanding Parkinson’s disease through multiple disciplinary collaborations.
Dorotea Fracchiolla, PhD
Dorotea is a Postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Prof. Gerhard Hummer at Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. During her PhD in the laboratory of Prof. Sascha Martens at Max Perutz Labs, University of Vienna (AT), she pioneered the development of in vitro reconstitution approaches for the study of selective autophagosome formation in yeast S. cerevisiae. Later on, during her PostDoc she switched to the study of these molecular machineries in H. Sapiens.
Benjamin Johnson, PhD
Ben Johnson, PhD, is an associate research scientist in the laboratory of Dr. De Camilli at Yale University and project manager for Team De Camilli within the Aligning Sciences Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) initiative. He received his BSc from Skidmore College and his MS and PhD in Biomedical Sciences from Colorado State University. Dr. Johnson’s work focuses on membrane contact site physiology and how disruption of their components and functions contribute to disease.
Felix Kraus, PhD
Felix is a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School. He completed is Bachelor and Master degrees in Munich, before moving to Melbourne to complete his PhD.
Haydeh Payami, PhD
Haydeh Payami, PhD, is Professor of Neurology and Genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. An immigrant from Iran, she received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, where she was trained as a mathematical geneticist. She is the founder and lead investigator of the NeuroGenetics Research Consortium (NGRC). Her work initially focused on the genetics of disease. Later, she expanded her search to include interaction of environmental risk and protective factors with human genome. Currently, she studies the interaction of gut microbiome, human genome, and environmental toxicants. Her aim is to put all the pieces together in the big picture, in order to identify the factors that trigger Parkinson’s disease pathology, biomarkers for early detection, and leads for improving treatment.
Laura Volpicelli-Daley, PhD
"While working as a senior scientist in the lab of Drs. Virginia Lee and John Trojanowski at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Volpicelli-Daley discovered that fibrils of α-synuclein act as seeds to template the growth of α-synuclein inclusions from endogenously expressed α-synuclein in neurons. These inclusions are remarkably similar morphologically and biochemically to those found in PD. Importantly, she showed the fibrils do not cause phenotypes in neurons lacking endogenous α-synuclein, demonstrating that corruption of normal α-synuclein contributes to neuronal defects. Currently, her lab focuses on the impact of pathologic α-synuclein on synapse architecture and function in the cortex and limbic brain regions. In addition, the lab studies how accumulation of glycosphingolipids in the brain causes neuronal dysfunction, synapse loss, and cognitive decline in PD.
