Benjamin Stecher is a Parkinson's disease patient advocate from Canada. We discuss the importance of focusing on the patient experience and the need for more interactions between patients and the scientists who work in a disease field

Professor Julie Williams is the head of the UK Dementia Research Institute (UK-DRI) at Cardiff University. Her lab focuses on identifying and understanding genes which alter the risk of neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s.

Pierre Vanderhaeghen is a group leader at VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain and Disease Research. Pierre’s lab is asking some fascinating questions about what makes our brains human.

Dr.  Fred Gage is the Professor of the lab of Genetics and Adler Chair for Age-Related Neurodegenerative Disease at the Salk Institute in San Diego, California

Vanessa Morais is neuroscientist working at the IMM (The institute of molecular medicine) in Lisbon, Portugal. Her lab is  interested in the role of mitochondria in the brain and how mitochondrial dysfunction arises in neurodegenerative conditions. We talk about how she got interested in biology and the mitochondria, her experiences of running her own lab and her thoughts on how to improve the representation of women at the highest levels of biomedical science.

This episode features Professor Alison Goate, who is a professor of Neuroscience and the Director of the Center for Alzheimer's Disease at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York city. Her lab there studies the molecular genetics of Dementia. Alison and her research team have made significant contributions to our understanding of the genetic causes underlying neurodegenerative diseases, especially Alzheimer's by using human genomic methods such as genome-wide association studies and exome sequencing.

This episode features Sarah Tabrizi, who is a Professor of Clinical Neurology at University College, London. As a doctor and a scientist, Sarah's professional career has centered around the devastating neurodegenerative condition - Huntington's Disease. We discuss some of the exciting new work on a potential therapy for Huntington's and touch of many other topics, personal and professional, that are close to Sarah's heart.    

In this episode, Vinoy talks to Dr.Tara Spires-Jones, professor at the University of Edinburgh and the UK Dementia Research Institute.

In this episode, Vinoy talks to Silvio Rizzoli, professor and director at the Department of Neuro- and Sensory Physiology of the University Medical Center in Göttingen.

In this episode, Vinoy talks to Xinnan Wang, professor at Stanford, who visited our center in 2017. Wang earned a MD/MSc from the China Medical University in 2003; a PhD in genetics from the University of Cambridge, UK in 2007; and did post-doctoral work in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Wang’s has been assistant professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine since 2011. Wang’s research aims to understand the regulatory mechanisms controlling mitochondrial dynamics and function and the mechanisms by which even subtle perturbations of these processes may contribute to neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. Download the episode.