Michel Goedert, MD, PhD
Michel Goedert is a Programme Leader at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, United Kingdom. His work established that tau protein is the central component of the paired helical filaments of Alzheimer's disease and that alpha-synuclein is the major component of the filamentous inclusions of Parkinson's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies and multiple system atrophy.
Elie Matar, MD, PhD
Elie Matar is an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney and an NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow. He is a clinician–scientist and dual-trained neurologist and sleep physician based at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, Australia. He completed undergraduate training in Physics and Physiology, followed by medical and doctoral training at the University of Sydney, and undertook further research training as an Endeavour Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He has also held national and international fellowships and visitorships, including at the Queen Square Institute of Neurology (UCL) and the Mayo Clinic. His work focuses on the biological mechanisms underlying sleep, cognitive, and non-motor symptoms in Parkinson’s disease and related Lewy body disorders.
Vilas Menon, PhD
Vilas Menon is currently an Assistant Professor of Neurological Sciences in the Division of Neuroimmunology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. His group investigates signatures of differential vulnerability and resistance at both the cell type and individual level in neurodegenerative diseases (including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's) and neuroimmune diseases (such as Multiple Sclerosis). He obtained his PhD in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University and spent several years as a scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, WA, and as a Fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus.
Sean Pintchovski, PhD
Sean has ~20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. During this time, he successfully led pre-clinical research teams to discover, validate, and advance several small molecules into the clinic, including PTC857 (GBA-Parkinson’s disease and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) and PTC743 (Friedreich’s ataxia). Additionally, Sean has contributed within cross-functional clinical teams to identify novel biomarkers and next-generation technologies needed to advance the use of precision medicine in neurology. He received a BS with Honors from the California Institute of Technology and earned his PhD in Neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco.
Emily Rocha, PhD
Emily is an early career investigator in the Department of Neurology at the University of Pittsburgh. As a postdoctoral fellow, at Harvard Medical school and University of Pittsburgh she applied basic cell biological tools and in vivo approaches to study how age-related changes in autophagy-lysosomal pathway and mitochondria impact PD progression.
Fabio Simoes de Souza, PhD
Fabio is a Project Manager and Senior Research Associate in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a former tenured professor at the Federal University of ABC. He holds a Ph.D in Psychobiology and has years of experience leading interdisciplinary team research in experimental and computational neuroscience, data analysis, and project management.
Günter Höglinger, MD
Günter serves as Professor and Director of the Department of Neurology at Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich, PI at the Munich Cluster for Systems Neurology (SyNergy), and senior scientist at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE). He leads several national and international observational and interventional studies aiming to identify new biomarkers and therapeutic strategies for synucleinopathies and tauopathies. His scientific excellence has been recognized with numerous prestigious awards.
Tal Iram, PhD
Tal joined the Department of Molecular Neuroscience at the Weizmann Institute in September 2024, following the completion of her postdoctoral research with Tony Wyss-Coray at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Jonathan Javitch, MD, PhD
Jonathan is the Lieber Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics at Columbia University, and Chief of the Division of Molecular Therapeutics at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He received his MD/PhD at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied the mechanism of MPTP neurotoxicity with Solomon Snyder, and completed postdoctoral training in receptor biochemistry with Arthur Karlin at Columbia University. His research on G protein-coupled receptor structure, function, and regulation in neuropsychiatric illness has been continuously funded by NIMH for over 30 years.
Gabor Kovacs, MD, PhD
Gabor G. Kovacs, MD, PhD, is Professor of Neuropathology and Neurology at the University of Toronto. He holds the Rossy Chair in PSP Research. A board certified neurologist and neuropathologist, his research focuses on the molecular neuropathology of neurodegenerative diseases, integrating human brain tissue analyses with clinical, biomarker, and genetic data to identify early biomarkers and therapeutic targets. He has published over 400 peer reviewed papers and edited major neuropathology textbooks, including Greenfield’s Neuropathology.
Rosalie Lawrence, PhD
Rosalie Lawrence is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. She studied biochemical mechanisms of mTOR signaling at the lysosome with Roberto Zoncu as a graduate student and structural mechanisms of Integrated Stress Response signaling with Peter Walter as a postdoctoral fellow.
Evan Macosko, MD, PhD
Evan Macosko is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Neurobiology and Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and a Core Member of the Broad Institute. He studied the genetics of behavior with Cori Bargmann as a graduate student, and developed Drop-seq, a foundational technology in single-cell genomics as a postdoctoral fellow with Steven McCarroll. His lab, based at the Broad Institute, develops and applies genomics methods to uncover pathogenic mechanisms of brain diseases.
Tuyana Malankhanova, PhD
Tuyana is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Andrew West at Duke University. She earned her PhD at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where she focused on neurodegenerative disease mechanisms, including Huntington’s and Parkinson’s diseases. During her doctoral training, she developed expertise in iPSC-based disease modeling and genome editing approaches, which now underpin her current research on lysosomal signaling and neuroimmune pathways in Parkinson’s disease.
Matthias Mann, PhD
Matthias heads the Proteomics and Signal Transduction department at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich. As a pioneer in mass spectrometry-based proteomics, he has developed foundational technologies and computational workflows for quantitative protein analysis and biomedical applications, with emphasis on translational research including body fluid proteomics, single-cell spatial proteomics, and post-translational modifications. With nearly 1,000 publications and an h-factor of 281 (Google Scholar), he is among the most cited researchers globally. His awards include election to the National Academy of Sciences, the Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics (shared with Ruedi Aebersold), Germany's Leibniz Prize, and the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine.
Angelina Maric, PhD
Angelina is a Research Group Leader at the Department of Neurology, University Hospital Zurich. She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology (summa cum laude) from the University of Zurich and completed interdisciplinary training in neuroscience and applied statistics. Her academic background is characterized by extensive experience in experimental sleep research, neuroscientific methodologies, and the design and leadership of complex translational studies in clinical and experimental settings.
Sarah Marzi, PhD
Sarah Marzi is a Senior Lecturer in Neuroscience and UK Dementia Research Institute Group leader at King's College London. Originally trained in mathematics and psychology, she has been working in the field of neuroepigenetics for 12 years, advancing our understanding of epigenetic mechanisms and enhancer driven gene regulation across neurodegenerative diseases.
Cristina Miguelez, PhD
Cristina is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Her academic trajectory combines scientific research, teaching, international collaboration, and public science communication. She completed her doctoral research at UPV/EHU and postdoctoral training at the University of Bordeaux, specializing in preclinical models, electrophysiology, and circuit-level interventions. She currently co-directs a cross-border laboratory on comorbidities in Parkinson’s disease and actively mentors undergraduate, Master’s, and PhD students.
Vijay Namboodiri, PhD
Vijay is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology, University of California San Francisco and holds the Scott Alan Myers Endowed Professorship. He studied timing behaviors and encoding as a graduate student with Marshall Shuler in Johns Hopkins University, and neural circuits of learning and motivated behavior with Garret Stuber at University of Washington. He is a Pew Biomedical Scholar, Klingenstein-Simons Fellow in Neuroscience, Alfred P Sloan Fellow in Neuroscience, and an Associate Member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.
Nandakumar Narayanan, MD, PhD
Dr. Nandakumar Narayanan is the Juanita J. Bartlett Professor of Neurology and Vice Chair for Research at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. He also serves as Director of the Iowa Center for Neurodegeneration. He is from Seattle, Washington and graduated from Stanford University and Yale University’s MD/PhD program. Dr. Narayanan is an expert in the neural mechanisms of cognitive dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease and related disorders. Dr. Narayanan has received numerous awards for his research and teaching, including the Donald B. Lindsley Prize for Behavioral Neuroscience, the S. Weir Mitchell Award for residency research, and the Jon Stolk Award for Movement Disorders Research.
Colleen Niswender, PhD
Colleen is an Associate Professor and the Warren and Senior Director of Molecular Pharmacology for the Warren Center of Neuroscience Drug Discovery at Vanderbilt University. She has been involved in the development of five compounds which have progressed into clinical trials for schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease. Her scientific goal is to work with teams that successfully launch drugs to impact one or several neurological, neurodevelopmental, or psychiatric diseases.
