Annette Ersbøll, PhD
Annette is a professor in epidemiology and biostatistics at the National Institute of Public Health at the University of Sothern Denmark. She studied at the Technical University of Denmark and gained both her MSC thesis and PhD thesis from here.
J Timothy Greenamyre, MD, PhD
Tim is a Distinguished Professor of Neurology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, where he divides his time between clinical care of people with PD and laboratory research on the pathogenesis of PD. Tim obtained his MD and PhD degrees at the University of Michigan where, under the guidance of Anne Young, he characterized brain glutamate receptors for his PhD thesis. He is the recipient of numerous scientific awards and honors, including the Robert A. Pritzker Prize for Leadership in Parkinson's Research from the Michael J Fox Foundation, which recognizes both his scientific contributions and his dedication to mentoring the next generation of PD scientists.
Nikoline Juul Nielsen, PhD
Nikoline is an Associate Professor in the Department of Plant and Environmental Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research is focused on advanced analytical chemistry for insight in complex environmental and biological samples, with special focus on (two-dimensional)chromatography and high-resolution mass spectrometry. Research endeavors include maximizing peak capacity and sensitivity beyond state-of-the-art, reducing matrix effects, comprehensive characterization of complex samples, de novo compound characterization and identification, and pattern recognition in complex samples and across processes.
Sofia Sepulveda Contreras, PhD
Sofia Sepulveda is a scientist who works as a senior research associate in the Department of Neurology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, under the direction of Dr. Claudio Soto. She holds a doctorate in Biomedical Sciences, and her main area of research over the past few years has focused on studying the interaction of microglia with misfolded proteins in synucleinopathies and Alzheimer's disease.
Eric Song, MD, PhD
Eric Hoyeon Song is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Immunobiology and Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences at Yale. His research investigates how tissue anatomy shapes organ-level immune responses, with a focus on the brain and eye. He trained in biomedical engineering with Mark Saltzman and in immunology with Akiko Iwasaki, both at Yale.
Fei Wang, PhD
Fei is a biochemist whose research goals are to explore the neurotoxic mechanisms and pathways that lead to neuronal degeneration and death, and to develop effective therapeutic strategies against these currently incurable conditions. He earned his PhD degree in Biochemistry from The Ohio State University. He joined The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Mitchell Center for Alzheimer’s Disease & Brain Disorders in 2018 and was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology in 2021.
Alberto Bartesaghi, PhD
Alberto is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Computer Science, Biochemistry, and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. He is a pioneer in developing computational methods to solve structures of macromolecular complexes by single particle cryo-EM and cryo-ET. He solved many influential structures including those of CRISPR/Cas9 complexes, GPCR/G-protein complexes, HIV-1/SARS glyco-proteins, and α-synuclein fibers. He is also interested more broadly in machine learning, computer vision, image processing, and high-performance computing. He received the “Norman P. Salzman Memorial Award in Virology” from the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD for his work on the molecular architecture of native HIV-1 gp120 trimers.
Jérôme Baufreton, PhD
Jerome Baufreton is a CNRS Research Director at the Institute of Neurodegenerative Diseases (IMN, UMR5293) and the head of the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Bordeaux. He studied basal ganglia physiology and especially dopamine modulation of subthalamic nucleus (STN) and external globus pallidus (GPe) neuron excitability.
Per Borghammer, MD, PhD
Per is a professor of nuclear medicine and neuroscience at the Dept. of Nuclear Medicine, Aarhus University Hospital, and the director of the Lundbeck Foundation Parkinson's disease Research Center (PACE), Aarhus University, Denmark. He applies a highly multi-disciplinary approach and has published extensively on advanced multimodal imaging of patients with Lewy body disease, development of novel PET tracers and analysis methods, animal studies of PD, epidemiology, and neuropathology.
Mario Borgnia, PhD
Mario J. Borgnia is Head of the Molecular Microscopy Group and Director of the Cryo-EM Core at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), and an adjunct professor at Duke University. He trained at Johns Hopkins University with Nobel Prize laureate Peter Agre, where he performed biophysical characterization of water transport by bacterial aquaporins. Motivated by the underlying structural mechanisms, he subsequently transitioned to cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) for structural biology training at the National Cancer Institute with Sriram Subramaniam.
Elizabeth Bradshaw, PhD
Elizabeth Bradshaw, PhD, is the Adler Assistant Professor of Neurological Sciences in the Department of Neurology at Columbia University Medical Center and Co-Director of the Carol and Gene Ludwig Center for Research on Neurodegeneration.
Jeff Bronstein, MD, PhD
Jeff is a Professor of Neurology, holder of the Silton Endowed Chair in Movement Disorders and Director of Movement Disorders at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He directs a basic science laboratory investigating the causes of PD (environmental and genetic) using cell and zebrafish models as well as population-based studies. His clinical interests include the medical and surgical management of Parkinson’s disease (PD), Wilson’s disease and other movement disorders. Dr. Bronstein active research program includes clinical trials to develop new therapies.
John Crary, MD, PhD
John F. Crary is a board-certified neuropathologist and physician-scientist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he directs the Neuropathology Brain Bank & Research CoRE and leads a translational program at the intersection of human tissue “ground truth” and modern AI. His work has helped shape consensus criteria across major tauopathies while pioneering computational neuropathology approaches that learn directly from whole-slide histology to predict neuroanatomy, clinical phenotypes, and brain aging trajectories. He is equally focused on building the infrastructure that makes discovery inevitable: scalable brain banking, digital pathology datasets, and human stem-cell models that connect mechanistic biology to real-world disease.
Derk-Jan Dijk, PhD
Derk-Jan is Distinguished Professor of Sleep and Physiology and Director of the Surrey Sleep Research Centre at the University of Surrey. He is Group Leader for Improving Sleep and Circadian Disruption in the UK Dementia Research Institute. Derk-Jan has more than 40 years of experience in sleep research. His current research interests include: the interaction of sleep homeostasis and circadian rhythmicity in the regulation of sleep and cognition and the validation and implementation of new technologies for monitoring sleep and circadian rhythms in dementia. Derk-Jan has served as Editor of the Journal of Sleep Research and is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Sleep Research Society (USA) and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.
Epaminondas Doxakis, PhD
Epaminondas Doxakis is a Principal Investigator at the Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens (BRFAA), where he leads a laboratory studying post-transcriptional regulation in Parkinson’s disease and related neurodegenerative disorders. He earned an MSc from Eötvös Loránd University, a PhD from the University of St Andrews, completed postdoctoral training at the University of Edinburgh and the Cardiff School of Biosciences, and holds an MBA from Edinburgh Business School. His work spans SNCA mRNA regulation, RNA-binding proteins and stress granule biology, non-coding RNAs (miRNAs, circRNAs, tRFs), ASO development, and RNA biomarker discovery. He coordinates multi-site collaborations.
Lenora Higginbotham, MD
Lenora is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Emory University where she specializes in movement disorders. She completed her medical school training at Emory University and neurology residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She then returned to Emory for a clinical movement disorders fellowship before joining neurology faculty in 2018. In addition to seeing clinic patients, Dr. Higginbotham conducts research focused on protein biomarker discovery in Lewy body dementia, including Parkinson’s disease dementia and Dementia with Lewy bodies.
