Dr. Alberto Ascherio is Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School. He graduated in medicine at the University of Milan, Italy, and practiced medicine and public health in Latin America and Africa for several years before moving to Boston, USA, where he obtained a DrPH degree from the Department of Epidemiology. Over the past 30 years he has led the Harvard neuroepidemiology research team focusing his work on neurodegenerative diseases, primarily multiple sclerosis, Parkinson disease (PD), and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). His research has leveraged the large Harvard cohorts comprising over 250 thousand men and women who have been followed longitudinally for over three decades, and multiple external resources, such as the Department of Defense Serum Repository, the Finnish Maternal cohort, the Danish MS registry, and data and biological samples from multiple large randomized trials. Among the primary aims of his work are the early identification and the discovery of modifiable determinants of risk and progression for neurodegenerative diseases.
He was awarded an honorary MD from the University of Southern Denmark in 2014 and an honorary PhD from the University of Bergen in 2024. In 2023 he delivered the Falch Lecture and in 2025 he received a life sciences Breakthrough Prize for discovering that the Epstein-Barr virus is the leading cause of multiple sclerosis.
