Jean-Francois Poulin, PhD
Jean-Francois is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and an Investigator at the Montreal Neurological Institute. He received his PhD from Université Laval and completed his postdoctoral training at Northwestern University under the supervision of Dr. Raj Awatramani.
Johan Jakobsson, PhD
Johan Jakobsson is a Professor in the Department of Experimental Medical Sciences at Lund University, Sweden and the Director of the Lund Stem Cell Center. He studied gene therapy in the brain as a graduate student in Lund and performed his postdoctoral work with Didier Trono at EPFL focusing on transposable elements.
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.
Malú Tansey, PhD
Malú Gámez Tansey, PhD, earned her BS/MS from Stanford University and, her PhD from University of Texas Southwestern and did post-doctoral work at Washington University on GDNF/Ret signaling. She spent two years at Xencor, where she co-invented dominant-negative soluble TNF inhibitors currently in clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease and COVID-19. Today, she is the Norman and Susan Fixel Chair in Neuroscience and Neurology and Co-Director of the Center for Translational Research in Neurodegenerative Disease at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Gainesville. Her lab focuses on the role of inflammation and immune system responses in brain health and mechanisms underlying development of neurodegenerative diseases. The long-term goal of her laboratory is to enable earlier diagnoses and better therapies to prevent and/or delay these diseases. Dr. Tansey is a fierce advocate for women and other under-represented groups in STEM and has earned several mentoring awards from students and faculty for these efforts
Laura Castilla-Vallmanya, PhD
Laura is a postdoctoral researcher at Lund University (Sweden). She obtained her PhD in Genetics from University of Barcelona (Spain) and has a strong background in studying human genetic variation and rare neurodevelopment disorders.
Ellen Fruzyna, PhD
Ellen is the project manager in the Awatramani lab at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, Department of Neurology. During her graduate studies at Northwestern in Grant Barish's lab, she utilized molecular and NGS techniques to explore transcriptional regulation in diabetes and MASH.
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.
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.
Rajeshwar Awatramani, PhD
Rajeshwar Awatramani, PhD, is a Professor of Neurology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and completed his postdoctoral training at Harvard University. The focus of his research has been the development and diversity of dopamine (DA) neurons. His lab has described the floor plate origin of DA neurons and is continuing to explore how floor plate progenitors are subdivided to give rise to the diverse adult midbrain DA neuron system. His lab also focuses on understanding DA neuron diversity. Using single cell profiling, his lab revealed the presence of putative DA neuron subtypes. To decipher the functional basis of DA neuron heterogeneity, Dr. Awatramani has developed a powerful set of intersectional genetic tools to access DA neuron subtypes and has found anatomical and functional heterogeneity even within a single anatomical cluster like the substantia nigra.
Roger Barker, PhD
Roger Barker is the Professor of Clinical Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge and Consultant Neurologist at the Addenbrooke’s Hospital Cambridge. He is a PI in the MRC-Wellcome Trust Stem Cell Institute in Cambridge and Director of the MRC funded UKRMP Stem and Engineered cell hub. His research seeks to better define the clinical heterogeneity of Parkinson’s (PD) and Huntington’s disease (HD). This has helped him define the best way by which to take new therapies into the clinic. In this respect he has been heavily involved in gene and cell based trials for patients with these conditions.
Mark Bevan, PhD
Mark Bevan, PhD, is a Professor of Neuroscience at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. His research focuses on the basal ganglia and their dysregulation in psychomotor disorders like Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease. His laboratory utilizes a range of molecular, electrophysiological, optogenetic, chemogenetic, and imaging approaches. In recent years, his research team has contributed to our understanding of dopaminergic modulation mechanisms and circuit consequences of dopamine loss in Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Bevan received his PhD from the University of Manchester and undertook postdoctoral training at the University of Oxford and the University of Tennessee, supported in part by an Advanced Training Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust. In 2012, Dr. Bevan received a Jacob Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award from NIH-NINDS, and in 2016 and 2018 he co-chaired the Basal Ganglia Gordon Research Conference. Dr. Bevan also directs an NIH-NINDS-funded training program in motor control mechanisms in health and disease.
Mark Cookson, PhD
Mark is the chief of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics, part of the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. His interest in Parkinson's disease genetics stems from work as a postdoc with John Hardy first at Mayo clinic Jacksonville then at NIH.
Daniel Dombeck, PhD
Daniel Dombeck, PhD, is an Associate Professor and AT&T Research Fellow in the Department of Neurobiology at Northwestern University. He received his BSc in physics at The University of Illinois and his PhD in physics at Cornell University. He carried out postdoctoral research at Princeton University in the Department of Molecular Biology and The Princeton Neuroscience Institute. Dr. Dombeck’s lab has pioneered the development and use of sub-cellular resolution functional imaging in behaving mice and discovered rapid movement related activity patterns from nigrostriatal dopamine axons. He was a Chicago Biomedical Consortium Junior Investigator, a Klingenstein Fellow, a McKnight Foundation Scholar, and a recipient of the Whitehall Research Grant Award. He is the associate director of the Northwestern University Interdepartmental Neuroscience graduate program and the director of the NIMH Neurobiology of Information Storage Training Grant.
Ruben Fernandez-Busnadiego, PhD
Dr. Ruben Fernandez-Busnadiego received his undergraduate degree in Physics from the Complutense University of Madrid. He carried out his PhD at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, investigating synaptic structure by cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET). Later on, as a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale School of Medicine, he studied various aspects of membrane biology in neurons. He then returned to the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry to lead a group investigating the structural links between protein aggregation and cell death in neurodegenerative diseases. Since 2019, he is a Professor at the University Medical Center Göttingen. His group continues to employ cutting edge cryo-ET to investigate in situ the structural basis of cellular function and disease-related dysfunction.
Ian Ganley, PhD
Ian Ganley, PhD, obtained his undergraduate and Master’s degree in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford in 1997, and after working for one year at Oxford Glycosciences Ltd., moved to the University of Cambridge to undertake a Ph.D. in the laboratory of Dr Nick Ktistakis to work on the lipid hydrolase phospholipase D1. In 2002 he moved to California, where he carried out postdoctoral research with Professor Suzanne Pfeffer at Stanford University to decipher the role of Rab proteins in intracellular transport. It was during this time that he became interested in the key cellular process of autophagy and so joined the laboratory of Dr Xuejun Jiang at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York to understand this further. Ian relocated to Dundee in August 2010 to establish his research group in the MRC PPU, and became a tenured programme leader in 2016. He is the developer of the "mito-QC" mitophagy reporter mouse model and a world leader in animal studies of mitophagy as related to PD.
Glenda Halliday, PhD
Glenda is a NHMRC Senior Leadership Fellow at the Brain and Mind Centre and Professor of Neuroscience in the School of Medical Sciences at the University of Sydney. Her research on central autonomic systems, Parkinson’s disease, alcohol toxicity, dementia with Lewy bodies, frontotemporal dementias and motor neurodegenerative diseases is well recognised, acknowledged by NHMRC High Achiever (2013) and Elizabeth Blackburn Clinical awards (2015 &2020), election to the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences (2015), the 2017 David Marsden Lecture Award from the International Parkinson Society and the 2016 Cozzarelli Prize from the National Academy of Sciences USA.
J. Wade Harper
Dr. Harper is the Chair of the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. His work focuses on the functions, mechanisms and targets of cullin-RING ubiquitin ligases. His recent work has led to the discovery of a phosphorylation-driven feed-forward ubiquitylation pathway controlling PARKIN-dependent mitophagy, and a molecular understanding of the pathways controlling selective autophagy. Dr. Harper has employed interaction proteomics to define interactions and complexes for more than 10,000 human proteins, providing numerous complexes linked to biological pathways. Awards include the Javits Neuroscience award, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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.
Zayd Khaliq, PhD
Zayd Khaliq, PhD, is a neuroscientist who studies cellular excitability and synaptic control of neurons in the midbrain dopamine system. His research focuses on dopaminergic neurons and uses a combination of electrophysiology, imaging, and optogenetics to examine how synaptic information is integrated and transmitted to trigger behaviorally -relevant patterns of dopamine release. His studies have contributed to our understanding of how dopamine receptors influence excitability through modulation of intrinsically -expressed ion channel proteins. Dr. Khaliq has contributed to our understanding of diversity among dopamine neuron subpopulations defined by their participation in identified circuits and the expression of biochemical markers. He is also known for his work examining how excitatory, inhibitory, and modulatory receptors contribute to processing within subcellular compartments such as spines, dendrites, and axons, which is critical for dopamine signaling in motor learning circuits.
Vikram Khurana, MD
Vikram (Vik) Khurana, MD PhD, is a physician-scientist and chief of the Division of Movement Disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Khurana and colleagues have advanced our understanding of the cellular consequences of alpha-synuclein-misfolding, the fundamental pathology associated with Parkinson’s and related diseases. They have identified and reversed alpha-synuclein pathologies in Parkinson’s patient stem cells, molecularly defined the relationship between these pathologies and genetic risk factors for the disease, and advanced therapies targeting alpha-synuclein to clinical trials. Dr. Khurana’s translational goal is to bring genomic and stem-cell technologies toward personalized diagnostics and therapeutics for Parkinson’s and related disorders. He is a former Fulbright Scholar, a George C. Cotzias Fellow of the American Parkinson’s Disease Association, and a New York Stem Cell Foundation Robertson Stem Cell Investigator. In 2020 his team was declared a grant recipient in The Michael J. Fox Foundation’s Ken Griffin Alpha-Synuclein Imaging Competition.
