AAIC 2016: Plenary Speaker Bios

Philip Scheltens, M.D., Ph.D.

Dr. Philip Scheltens studied at the VU University, gaining his M.D. in 1984, his Ph.D. in 1993 and became Professor of Cognitive Neurology and Director of the Alzheimer Center at the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam in 2000. In 2012 he initiated the national dementia plan in the Netherlands, called the “Deltaplan Dementie” and was appointed as vice-chair of the board in 2013. He is founder of, and has directed since 2000 the VUmc Alzheimer Center, which under his directorship produced to date over 56 Ph.D. theses.

He has authored more than 750 peer reviewed papers and over 50 book chapters and co-edited several textbooks. His work is widely cited, as evidenced by a current Hirsch factor of 94. He wrote his first Dutch book entitled “het Alzheimermysterie” together with Wiesje van der Flier, which entered the bestseller list in two weeks in 2015 and initiated another book: "Herinnering is het mooiste woord" in 2016.

He was elected member of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and has served as a member of the Board of Directors since 2015. In 2017, he received the Grand Prix for Alzheimer's disease research.

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Dennis Selkoe, M.D.

Dr. Dennis Selkoe graduated from Columbia and The University of Virginia. After training at the NIH, he completed a residency at Harvard/Longwood and a postdoctoral fellowship at the HMS Department of Neuroscience. Selkoe and colleagues isolated the tangles of Alzheimer’s disease and co-discovered their antigenic relationship to tau. His research on amyloid ß-protein and APP led to the “amyloid hypothesis” of AD, showed that Aβ is produced by cells throughout life, and that mutations in APP and, later, presenilin, increase Aβ. Michael Wolfe and Selkoe identified presenilin as γ-secretase. His lab has applied similar approaches to alpha-synuclein, the key protein of Parkinson’s disease. Selkoe has focused on translating his discoveries on the cause and mechanism of Alzheimer’s disease into therapeutic approaches, and his findings have provided the underpinnings and rationale of numerous disease-modifying trials currently underway worldwide.

He is a fellow of the American Academy of Neurology and Association of American Physicians and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He was the principal founding scientist of Athena Neurosciences, and is now a founding director of Prothena Biosciences. He is the Vincent and Stella Coates Professor of Neurologic Diseases at Harvard Medical School and co-director for the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases, Brigham and Women's Hospital.

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Oskar Hansson, M.D., Ph.D.

Dr. Oskar Hansson studied at Lund University, gaining his Ph.D. in neurobiology in 2001, his M.D. in 2005, and became senior consultant in neurology in 2012 and full professor of neurology in 2017. Oskar Hansson has performed internationally recognized clinical and translational research focusing on the earliest phases of Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s diseases. His landmark study on cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease from 2006 has been instrumental for the implementation of these biomarkers in the clinical work-up of Alzheimer's disease in Sweden and internationally. His continued clinical research is internationally recognized and his work on biomarkers has led to over 170 original peer-reviewed publications. Eight years ago he started the prospective and longitudinal Swedish BioFINDER study (http://biofinder.se/), where the research team focuses on the development of optimized diagnostic algorithms for early diagnosis, and also studies the consequences of different brain pathologies on cognitive, neurologic and psychiatric symptoms in healthy individuals and patients with dementia and parkinsonian disorders. Besides being responsible for the outpatient ward of the Memory Clinic at Skåne University Hospital, he is also in leading positions of several research networks and he is co-director of the strategic research area of neuroscience at Lund University.

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Julie Williams, Ph.D.

Dr. Julie Williams is a Professor of Neuropsychological Genetics at Cardiff University and the Chief Scientific Advisor of the Welsh Government. A senior figure in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) research, her 2009 publication of the first new AD susceptibility genes for 17 years was pivotal, made possible by her recognition of the complexity of AD genetics and her focus on developing powerful studies. She leads the GERAD (Genetic and Environmental Risk in Alzheimer’s Disease) consortium, shares leadership of the IGAP (International Genomics of Alzheimer’s Disease Project) consortium, incorporating over 150 scientists world-wide and a more than 90,000 participant cohort, analyses of which have identified over 13 new AD susceptibility genes. With research interests encompassing GWAS, sequencing, exome chip association, cross disease complex phenotypic and statistical analyses, she has served on Boards for MRC Neuroscience and Mental Health, Alzheimer’s Research U.K. Using her position to broaden scientific funding options, to increase research capacity and training, she actively campaigns to keep dementia research on the national agenda. She advises U.K. and Welsh Governments on policy. She is Dean of Research at Cardiff University School of Medicine, a NISCHR Senior Faculty member and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the Queen's Jubilee Birthday Honours list 2012.

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Simon Lovestone, Ph.D.

Dr. Simon Lovestone is Professor of Translational Neuroscience at Oxford University and has research interests in the regulation of tau phosphorylation, in the search for genetic and other biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease and building on these in drug discovery and experimental medicine. Underpinning all these studies is the use of informatics - clinical informatics, bioinformatics and the challenges of extracting value from very large variable datasets. He is also a practicing Old Age Psychiatrist specializing in dementia detection, diagnosis and management. The lab group’s work is described here and the ARUK Oxford Drug Development Institute led by Lovestone and Bountra is here.

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Won-Suk Chung, Ph.D.

Dr. Won-Suk Chung is an assistant professor at the Department of Biological Sciences at KAIST in South Korea. Dr. Chung earned his B.S. at Seoul National University in South Korea and received his Ph.D. in developmental genetics in 2009 at the University of California, San Francisco. After completing his Ph.D., he worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Dr. Ben Barres at Stanford University. During his postdoctoral works, he found that astrocytes, the most abundant cell type in the central nervous system, actively contribute to the activity-dependent synapse elimination that refines neural circuits during development by phagocytosing synapses via the MEGF10 and MERTK phagocytic pathway. In 2016, Dr. Chung started his own laboratory at KAIST, where he is continuously working on molecular mechanisms and physiological impacts of astrocyte-mediated synapse elimination in the healthy and diseased brains.

Virginia Man-Yee Lee, Ph.D.

Dr. Virginia M.-Y. Lee is the John H. Ware 3rd Professor in Alzheimer’s Research in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. She studied music at the Royal Academy of Music in London (1962-1964), obtained an M.S. in Biochemistry from the University of London (1968) and received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of California at San Francisco in 1973. Dr. Lee did postdoctoral studies in pharmacology at the Rudolf Magnus Institute at the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands (1973-1974) and in experimental neuropathology at Children’s Hospital Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston (1974-1979) after which she became Associate Senior Research Investigator at Smith-Kline & French, Inc. in Philadelphia from 1979-1980. She joined the faculty of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania in 1981 where she rose to the rank of professor in 1989. Dr. Lee completed the Executive MBA program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (1982-1984) and obtained her MBA degree in 1984. Currently she is Director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research and Co-director of the Marian S. Ware Alzheimer Drug Discovery Program at Penn. She was a member of the National Advisory Council on Aging (NIA) and the NIA Board of Scientific Counselors and was elected to the Institute of Medicine (2006) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2013).

Dr. Lee’s research focuses on proteins that form pathological inclusions in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD), frontotemporal degeneration (FTD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and related neurodegenerative disorders. Her work demonstrated that tau, alpha-synuclein and TDP-43 proteins form unique inclusions in neurodegenerative diseases and that aggregation of these proteins is a common mechanistic theme in AD, PD, FTLD, ALS and related disorders.

Aaron Gitler, Ph.D.

Dr. Aaron Gitler majored in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Penn State University and received a B.S. degree in 2000. He earned a Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004.

For his postdoctoral studies, he joined the laboratory of Dr. Susan Lindquist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Here he used yeast as a model system to study mechanisms of human neurodegenerative diseases that are associated with protein misfolding, such as Parkinson’s disease. He performed high-throughput yeast genetic screens to identify modifiers of toxicity associated with the accumulation of misfolded human disease proteins.

In 2007, he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and in 2012 he moved to Stanford, where he is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics. His research uses a combination of yeast and human genetics to define mechanisms of neurodegenerative disease and has focused on Parkinson’s disease, ALS and frontotemporal degeneration. His group has made several fundamental discoveries into mechanisms of FTD and ALS. These discoveries include the discovery of mutations in the ataxin 2 gene as one of the most common genetic risk factors for ALS.

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Julie Schneider, M.D.

Dr. Julie A. Schneider is the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Presidential Professor of Pathology (Neuropathology) and Neurological Sciences, and the Associate Director and Neuropathology Core Leader of the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center, at Rush University Medical Center. She completed Neurology residency at the University of Chicago and Neuropathology fellowship at Emory University and is board certified in both specialties. Dr. Schneider is also certified in Geriatric Neurology, and has a Master’s of Science degree in Clinical Research/Epidemiology. She is the senior neuropathologist for multiple studies including the Religious Orders Study and Rush Memory and Aging Project. Dr. Schneider’s research focuses on pathologic factors in the clinical expression of cognitive and motor decline in aging; specifically Alzheimer’s, vascular and mixed pathologies. More recently, Dr. Schneider has been studying TDP-43 and hippocampal sclerosis pathologies, and the linking of age-related pathologies with neuroimaging to study disease pathogenesis and biomarkers. Dr. Schneider has over 240 peer-reviewed publications, has provided peer-review for over 25 journals and has performed numerous grant reviews for the NIH, Alzheimer’s Association and other agencies. She has served on numerous national and international advisory boards for academia and industry and has presented her research both nationally and internationally.

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