Agnete Kirkeby, PhD
Agnete Kirkeby is an Associate Professor and group leader at the Novo Nordisk Foundation for Stem Cell Medicine (reNEW) at University of Copenhagen (Denmark) and at the Wallenberg Center for Molecular Medicine at Lund University (Sweden). The Kirkeby group has unique expertise in xenotransplantation and in using human pluripotent stem cells for production of subtype-specific human neurons, including also high-purity cultures of ventral midbrain dopamine neurons. This work has led to a European-based development of a stem cell treatment for Parkinson’s Disease (STEM-PD), which entered clinical trial in 2022 in Sweden (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05635409). The group further produces various other different types of neurons and glial cells for use in regenerative therapy and disease modelling, and also studies early brain development using human stem cell and advanced microfluidic culturing techniques to model the developing human fetal neural tube.
Talia Lerner, PhD
Talia Lerner is an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Dr. Lerner earned her BS in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry from Yale University. She earned her PhD in Neuroscience from UCSF under Dr. Anatol Kreitzer, and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University under Dr. Karl Deisseroth.
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.
Loukia Parisiadou, PhD
Loukia Parisiadou, PhD, has focused her studies on the cellular and molecular pathophysiology of Parkinson’s disease (PD). She completed her postdoctoral training in Dr. Andy Singleton’s laboratory at the National Institute on Aging. Loukia Parisiadou joined a few years after the laboratory showed that mutations in the LRRK2 gene cause PD. This sparked her scientific interest in determining the physiological functions of the coded protein in the mammalian brain and the molecular mechanism(s) through which disease-associated variants in the LRRK2 gene induce neuronal dysfunction. Over the last 14 years, her efforts to study the LRRK2 related PD provided novel insights into the undetermined role of LRRK2 kinase. It also led to the generation of several mouse models and conceptual advances of the molecular basis of PD. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the Parisiadou laboratory at Northwestern University studies the neuronal cell-type-specific dysfunctions in PD supported by the NINDS and The Michael J. Fox Foundation grants.
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.
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.
Maria Grazia Spillantini, PhD
Maria Grazia Spillantini is Professor of Molecular Neurology in the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge. Her interest is on alpha-synucleinopathies and tauopathies. With her collaborators, she identified alpha-synuclein as the component of the filaments that form the Lewy bodies in Parkinson’s disease, dementia with Lewy bodies and the glial inclusions in multiple system atrophy and described one of the first mutations in the MAPT gene causing frontotemporal dementia. She has received several awards and is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Knight Officer of the Star of Italy.
Christine Stadelmann, MD
Christine Stadelmann(-Nessler), MD, is a Professor of Neuropathology at the University Medical Center Göttingen, Germany, and Director of the Institute of Neuropathology. She received her MD from Vienna Medical School, Austria, and underwent postgraduate training in the labs of Drs. Hans Lassmann and Wolfgang Brück, focusing on neuronal cell death and inflammation in neuroinflammatory and neurodegenerative diseases. She is an expert on the neuropathological differential diagnosis of inflammatory CNS diseases, and engages in brain banking activities. Dr. Stadelmann’s lab investigates the pathophysiology of myelin and neuroaxonal damage in demyelinating diseases combining work on human tissue with in vivo experimental models. Her lab specializes in characterizing the disease mechanisms of progressive multiple sclerosis focusing on the innate immune system, in particular microglial cells. Other research programs address the cellular basis of remyelination. Recently, her lab could demonstrate infection of and damage to the olfactory epithelium in COVID-19 cases.
Lorenz Studer, MD
Lorenz Studer, MD, is the director of the Center for Stem Cell Biology and a member of the Developmental Biology Program at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. His lab has established many of the currently available techniques for turning human pluripotent stem cells into the diverse cell types of the nervous system. He has also been among the first to realize the potential of patient-specific stem cells in modeling human disease and in drug discovery and has developed strategies to measure and manipulate cellular age in pluripotent-derived lineages. Finally, he has a major interest in regenerative medicine and currently leads a multidisciplinary consortium to pursue the clinical application of human stem cell-derived dopamine neurons for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. Recent awards recognizing Dr. Studer’s work include a MacArthur Fellowship, the Ogawa-Yamanaka Prize and the Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine.
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.
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.
Michael Ward, MD, PhD
Dr. Ward received his B.S. from Kenyon College in 1999 and M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Washington University in St. Louis in 2007. As a graduate student, he worked in Yi Rao’s lab and studied the regulation of cell migration during neurodevelopment. Following a neurology residency at the University of California in San Francisco, he sub-specialized in behavioral neurology and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Li Gan’s lab studying basic mechanisms of frontotemporal dementia. As a fellow he received an American Brain Foundation CRTF award and a NIH K08 career development award. In 2015 he joined the NINDS as an Assistant Clinical Investigator. His research focuses on identifying intersecting mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases, with an ultimate goal of developing targeted, disease-modifying therapies for affected patients.
Andrew West, PhD
Andrew B. West, PhD, received a PhD from the Mayo Clinic in 2003, with post-doctoral work at the University of California, Los Angeles and Johns Hopkins University. He was awarded F31 and F32 individual fellowships from the NIH and selected in the first wave of K99/R00 awards. Past awards include a John Jurenko Professorship and a Translating Duke Health Fellowship. Dr. West is a tenured Professor of Pharmacology at Duke University with secondary appointments in Neurology and Neurobiology. He currently directs the Duke Center for Neurodegeneration and Neurotherapeutic Research, serves on the NINDS Parkinson’s Disease Biomarker Program NINDS-PDBP steering committee, the Executive Scientific Advisory Board at The Michael J. Fox Foundation, the NIH NSD-B study section, and is a board-reviewing editor for eLife. Dr. West’s research focuses on the exploration of LRRK2 and alpha-synuclein proteins as therapeutic targets for the amelioration of Parkinson’s disease, novel biomarkers informative for disease mechanisms and therapeutic responses, and defining new cellular pathways important in neurodegeneration.
