Sabrina Katzdobler is a Neurology Resident and Research Fellow at the LMU University hospital (Munich, Germany) specializing in neurodegenerative diseases. Her main area of research is the discovery and development of fluid-based and imaging biomarkers for atypical parkinsonian syndromes. Drawing from the experience of co-leading multiple longitudinal cohort studies and subsequently integrating detailed clinical characterization of patients into her biomarker research, she has a strong focus on translational biomarker discovery and development. She has a special interest in the interplay of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration using multimodal characterization of reactive astrocytosis and microglial activation.

Dr. Ichiro Kawahata is an Associate Professor in the Department of CNS Drug Innovation, Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Tohoku University Japan. He is joining research on the pathogenesis of α-synucleinopathy, including Parkinson's disease, Dementia with Lewy Bodies, and Multiple System Atrophy. He is also engaging in therapeutic development for Lewy body diseases. Dr. Kawahata disclosed the impact of fatty acid-binding proteins (FABPs) on the pathogenesis of α-synucleinopathies and is developing FABP-targeting drugs for Lewy body diseases. He is also joining the development of novel biomarkers of neuroinflammation and risk scoring method, which assists early detection and personalized medicine of dementia and movement disorders as well as psychiatric diseases. We are excited about the collaboration and look forward to speaking with medical doctors, pharmacists, researchers, and the drug industries.

Rakez Kayed, PhD. is the John Sealy Distinguished Chair in Parkinson Disease Research, Professor at the Departments of Neurology and Neuroscience & Cell Biology & Anatomy, and a member of George & Cynthia Mitchell Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases a at University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston Texas. He received his Ph. D in Medicinal Chemistry from University of Tubingen and Post-Doctoral training in Alzheimer’s disease and Protein Misfolding Diseases at the University of California-Irvine and joined the faculty at UTMB in 2007, The research in his laboratory focuses on amyloid aggregates and toxic oligomers formed by disease-associated proteins tau, α-synuclein, amyloid-β and others. His lab studies the formation, biochemically, biophysical, and immunologically characterization, toxicity and spreading of biologically active oligomeric polymorphs/strains and their potential role in the disease pathogenesis. He pioneered the development of oligomer specific antibodies and many reagents and methodologies that are being used extensively to studying protein aggregation and mechanisms of toxicity. The ultimate research goals are developing detection assays discriminating between amyloid aggregates and therapeutic strategies tailored against oligomeric strains. Dr. Kayed has exceptionally vibrant track record for engaging in cutting-edge amyloid research, coauthored more than 145 peer-reviewed articles with more than 31,000 citations.

Currently I am working as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the research group of Prof. Brian Bacskai at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Boston. I use in vivo multiphoton imaging to quantify functional brain pathophysiology in mouse models of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Previously, I completed my PhD and Masters research work under the academic mentorship of Prof. Christopher Mitchell at University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, where we used scanning electron microscopy to quantify cerebral and systemic vasculature in a mouse model of AD. With a strong commitment to AD research, my research goals are to identify therapeutic targets and pharmacological strategies to improve the brain health of individuals living with AD..

Medical diploma from the VU medical center Amsterdam, The Netherlands, followed by two years of clinical work on the neurology wards. Currently finishing my 4-year PhD program at the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden, on the validation of PET-radioligand [18F]FE-PE2I as imaging marker for dopaminergic degeneration in people with Parkinson's disease, with a test-retest study and clinical correlation studies (cross-sectional and longitudinal).

Movement Disorders Specialist since 2011. Areas of interest: Huntington Disease, Parkinson Disease, Early (Premotor) diagnostics of PD, Dementias

After an initial training in biochemistry and molecular biology, I obtained a PhD in neurobiology. I currently lead the Alzheimer's Disease research team at the Institute of Neuroscience of UCLouvain, of which I was the chair from 2016 to 2019. The main objective of our work is to understand the mechanisms by which major players in the pathology (APP and presenilins), due to mutations or aging, promote a context of cellular senescence and how this can produce early biomarkers of the pathology.