Elisa Greggio, PhD
Elisa is Professor of Physiology in the Department of Biology at the University of Padova, Italy. For over 20 years, she has studied the molecular mechanisms underlying familial forms of Parkinson’s disease, first as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute on Aging (Bethesda, US) and later as an independent investigator at University of Padova where she was awarded the Milla Baldo Ceolin Prize for Best Woman in Science.
Erinc Halliacli, PhD
Erinc Hallacli is an instructor in neurology in Vikram Khurana's lab at Brigham and Womens' Hospital. He was trained as a molecular biologist and geneticist as an undergraduate. He received an MSc degree from Heidelberg University, Germany for his work on the relationship between RNA export and transcription conducted in Ed Hurt lab. He studied genome-wide chromatin regulators with Asifa Akhtar in EMBL and Max Planck Institute for his doctoral thesis. He started his research on RNA binding proteins as prions in Susan Lindquist lab. He has been working on the relationship between RNA binding proteins and alpha-synuclein in Dr.Khurana lab. He is currently an instructor at Harvard Medical School and holds several awards including EMBO and HFSP fellowships.
Anastasia Henry, PhD
Anastasia (Stacy) Henry is a Senior Director and Staff Scientist at Denali Therapeutics, where she leads a team within the Pathway Biology group. Stacy has served as the project leader for Denali’s DNL310 program, a blood-brain-barrier-penetrant enzyme replacement therapy for MPS II disease, and leads the biology efforts supporting the LRRK2 kinase inhibitor program, both of which are now in late-stage clinical studies. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco, under the mentorship of Mark von Zastrow, and completed her postdoctoral training in the Neuroscience Department at Pfizer in Warren Hirst's lab.
Nick Hollon, PhD
Nick Hollon is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Psychiatry at the University of California San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from University of Washington and postdoctoral training at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
Hilal Lashuel, PhD
Hilal is a Professor of Neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medicine–Qatar and an Emeritus Professor at EPFL. His PhD and postdoctoral work focused on biophysical dissection of amyloid formation by transthyretin, amyloid-β, and α-synuclein under the mentorship of Prof. Jeffery Kelly (Scripps Research Institute) and Prof. Peter Lansbury (Harvard Medical School). His honors include the Takreem Foundation Scientific & Technological Achievement Award, the Kuwait Prize in Fundamental Sciences (Biological Sciences), the H. Martin Friedman Distinguished Lectureship at Brooklyn College (CUNY), and the EPFL School of Life Sciences Ambition Award.
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.
Abigail Polter, PhD
Abby is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Physiology at George Washington University. She studied the role of intracellular signaling cascades in mood regulation as a graduate student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and uncovered novel stress-induced regulation of dopaminergic systems by kappa opioid receptors as a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University.
Annelies Quaegebeur, MD, PhD
Annelies Quaegebeur, MD, PhD, FRCPath, is an Associate Professor at the University of Leuven, a Group Leader at the University of Cambridge and an honorary consultant neuropathologist at Cambridge University Hospitals. She is the Research Lead of the Cambridge Brain Bank. Following a PhD at the University of Leuven on cellular and molecular mechanisms in neurodegeneration and Neurology training at the University Hospitals Leuven, she trained as a Neuropathologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery and Queen Square Brain Bank in London. Her research is focused on understanding the role of glia in neurodegeneration. Her team has expertise in applying spatial omic technologies and digital pathology pipelines to post-mortem brain tissue.
Esther Sammler, MD, PhD
Esther is a clinician-scientist with a focus on Parkinson’s disease (PD) and neurogenetics. Her research uses a translational bench-to-bedside approach to accelerate the validation and application of basic scientific discoveries for obtaining a better understanding of the pathogenic mechanisms in PD and developing biomarkers for patient stratification. Her recent work has centered on LRRK2 and its modifiers: She has developed new methods using surrogate biochemical markers to interrogate the activity of LRRK2 in peripheral blood cells. In collaboration with Dario Alessi and Alexander Zimprich, she has shown that people with PD who carry a particular pair of mutations have significantly increased activity in the LRRK2 kinase pathway, suggesting that these mutations activate LRRK2 by a yet unknown mechanism. In addition, Dr. Sammler runs a specialist PD clinic and acts as principal investigator for clinical trials and research projects
Kendall Van Keuren-Jensen, PhD
Kendall Van Keuren-Jensen is Vice President for Research at TGen and a Professor in the Bioinnovation and Genome Sciences Division. Her research applies extracellular vesicle and extracellular RNA biology to understand how genetic perturbations alter cellular cargo release in neurodegenerative diseases. Her laboratory specializes in isolating and profiling EV-contents to assess how disease-linked genetic variants reshape secreted molecular cargo and influence signaling in recipient cells. In parallel, she leverages single-cell, single-nucleus, and spatial transcriptomics to contextualize RNA changes within vulnerable brain cell populations.
Sreeja Vijayan Nair, PhD
Sreeja is a postdoctoral researcher in the Pfeffer lab at the Department of Biochemistry, Stanford University. She completed her graduate studies at IISER Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India. During her graduate research, she worked on regulators of the NF-kB signaling pathway and protein ubiquitination.
Rebecca Wallings, PhD
Becky Wallings is an Assistant Professor at Indiana University’s Stark Neurosciences Research Institute and the Departments of Neurology and Microbiology & Immunology. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford, where she identified a novel LRRK2 substrate linking PD mutations to lysosomal dysfunction. During her postdoctoral work, which focused on lysosomal regulation of neuroinflammation in PD, Becky received fellowships from the Parkinson Foundation and BrightFocus Foundation and was awarded a Parkinson Foundation Launch Award to establish her independent laboratory. Her research investigates how immune aging, immune cell exhaustion, and immunosenescence drive neurodegeneration, with the goal of developing immune-targeted strategies to slow or prevent Parkinson’s disease.
Marius Wernig, MD, PhD
Dr. Wernig is a Professor of Pathology at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University. He graduated with an MD-PhD from the Technical University of Munich where he studied in the lab of Rudi Balling. Dr.Wernig continued on to do a residency in Neuropathology and General Pathology at the University of Bonn and then became a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge. Dr. Wernig received numerous awards including the Cozzarelli Prize from the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A. the Outstanding Investigator Award from the International Society for Stem Cell Research, the New York Stem Cell Foundation Robertson Stem Cell Prize, and the Ogawa-Yamanaka Stem Cell prize.
Tim Whitsett, PhD
Tim is the Senior Director of Institutional Research Initiatives and a Scientific Writer at TGen. After graduating from Yale University, he studied cancer chemoprevention and animal modeling at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He went on as a postdoctoral fellow and principle investigator at TGen where he applied leading-edge genomics to lung and esophageal cancers.
Le Zhang, PhD
Le Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology at Yale School of Medicine. Le obtained her B.S. in Biological Science from Peking University and her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from the University of Hong Kong. Le had her postdoctoral trainings at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Medical School.
Lisa Barnhill, PhD
Lisa is an Assistant Project Scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine. She conducts research in the field of environmental toxicology directed at understanding how environmental exposures can alter neurodegenerative disease processes. Her previous research explored how exposure to components of air pollution can induce neurotoxicity in a zebrafish model system.
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.
Philip De Jager, MD, PhD
Philip is the Chief of the Division of Neuroimmunology and Deputy Director of the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. He is a practicing clinical neuroimmunologist and molecular/statistical geneticist and cellular neuroimmunologist. He completed his MD PhD at Rockefeller University and Cornell Medical Center before finishing his clinical and specialty training at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham & Women's Hospital. He then joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School before creating the Division of Neuroimmunology at Columbia. His interest lies in understanding and modulating the role of immune responses in human neurodegeneration using unbiased, data-driven approaches.
David Eisenberg
David S. Eisenberg is the Paul D. Boyer Chair of Molecular Biology at UCLA. His research focuses on the molecular basis of neurodegeneration, using structural and biochemical tools. He is a member of both the National Acadamies of Science and Medicine.
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.
