Monther Abu-Remaileh, PhD
Monther Abu-Remaileh, PhD, is an assistant professor of chemical engineering and by courtesy of genetics at Stanford University. He is an expert in lysosome biology and metabolism, and his team develops and uses multidisciplinary approaches, including metabolomics, proteomics and functional genomics, to study the biochemical functions of the lysosome. His lab is committed to applying these tools to provide molecular understanding of the lysosomal dysfunction in Parkinson's disease, which has been implicated in disease pathology. Dr. Abu-Remaileh earned his B.Sc. in Genetics from Jordan University of Science and Technology and his doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and then completed his postdoctoral training at MIT.
Johnson Agniswamy, PhD
Johnson Agniswamy is the project manager for team Wichmann. He is part of the Emory Primate Center, NND-Neuroscience, Emory University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of Madras. In his previous employments, he worked at Georgia State University, focusing on structural studies on HIV drug resistance and the structure-based drug design of HIV protease. As part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH, he has researched structural studies on human immune system evasion by flesh-eating bacteria.
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.
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.
Cláudia Mendes, PhD
Cláudia is a Project Manager at the Cragg Group based in the University of Oxford. During her doctoral studies, supervised by Christen Mirth and Élio Sucena at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência in Portugal, Cláudia explored how growth and differentiation during ovary development are modified by larval nutrition in the fruit fly. She later moved to the UK to conduct her first postdoctoral research project with Alistair McGregor and Daniela Nunes in Oxford Brookes University, where she investigated the genetic mechanisms underlying variation in the size and shape of the external male genitalia between two closely related fly species. Cláudia then became interested in how tissues and organs lose the ability to control their growth, which is one of the hallmarks of tumour initiation and progression. She conducted her second and final postdoctoral research project in the Wilson Group at the University of Oxford. She is now keen to have a successful career in project management.
Sara Salama, PhD
Sara graduated as a pharmacist from King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2016. She obtained her PhD in Molecular Immunology from KU Leuven in 2021. Afterwards, she went on to perform post-doctoral research as a fellow of the FWO (Research Foundation Flanders) in the Rega Institute for Medical research. Her research interests are primarily focused on characterizing the biological activity of the acute phase protein, serum amyloid A in relation to its capacity to regulate leukocyte function. Moreover, she is involved in characterizing the post translationally modified variants of inflammatory proteins.
Andreea Bostan, PhD
Andreea is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and the Systems Neuroscience Center at the University of Pittsburgh. A graduate of the University of Toronto, she received her doctorate in Neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh. Andreea has used neurotropic viruses as transneuronal tracers to establish that the cerebellum and basal ganglia are interconnected and form an integrated network with the cerebral cortex. She is particularly interested in how changes in the integrated network, which links the cerebellum with the basal ganglia and the cerebral cortex, contribute to the manifestation of neurologic and psychiatric disorders.
Miratul Muqit
Dr Miratul Muqit is a Professor in the MRC Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit, University Dundee, and a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow. He studied Medicine at the University of Edinburgh and was a graduate student with Nicholas Wood at UCL Institute of Neurology where he contributed to the discovery of PINK1 mutations as a cause of Parkinson's. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2020.
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.
Raja Sekhar Nirujogi, PhD
Raja is an Independent Investigator at Medical Research Council Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit at University of Dundee. He contributed to the identification of LRRK2 kinase substrates and developed targeted mass spectrometry assays and organelle proteomic methodologies. His current research is focused on applying single cell proteomic methodologies to better understand PD brain disease heterogeneity.
Suzanne Pfeffer, PhD
Suzanne Pfeffer is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine. She studied synaptic vesicle recycling as a graduate student with Regis Kelly at UCSF and membrane trafficking with James Rothman as a postdoc at Stanford. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB), and Past President of ASCB and the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
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.
Amanda Schneeweis, PhD
Amanda is the program manager for Team Awatramani! Her background is in Alzheimer's disease research but is very excited to contribute to the PD field! Amanda is based in Chicago, IL.
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.
Thomas Wichmann, MD
Thomas Wichmann, MD, received medical training at the Universities of Münster and Freiburg (Germany), graduating in 1984, with subsequent postdoctoral research training at the University of Freiburg and Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD), and neurology residency training at Emory University (Atlanta, GA). He has been a faculty member at Emory University since 1996, specializing in research into the pathophysiology of parkinsonism and the clinical care of patients with Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease. He is currently the A. Worley Brown Professor of Neurology, Associate Director of the Movement Disorder division in Neurology, and Associate Director for Scientific Programs at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. His research has been continuously NIH funded, and has been published in high-impact journals. Dr. Wichmann also leads Emory’s NINDS-funded Udall Center of Excellence in Parkinson’s Disease Research, and the American Parkinson’s Disease Association’s Center for Advanced Research at Emory University.
Chuyu Chen, PhD
Chuyu is a postdoc fellow in the department of Pharmacology, Northwestern University. She studied the pathologic mechanism of LRRK2 by generating a disease model as a graduate student. After joining Parisiadou's lab, she is devoted to studying cell type specific LRRK2 dysfunction.
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.
Dario Alessi, PhD
Professor Dario Alessi serves as the Director of the MRC Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit at the University of Dundee. His research focuses on unravelling the roles of poorly characterised components which regulate human disease resulting from disruption of signalling networks. He has contributed to our understanding of several disease relevant signal transduction pathways including PDK1 (diabetes and cancer), LKB1 (cancer), WNKs (blood pressure). Much of Dario’s current work is focused on understanding LRRK2 and how mutations in this enzyme cause Parkinson’s disease.
