Raquel Taddei, MD, is an Instructor in Neurology (Harvard Medical School) and Clinical Fellow in dementia (Mass. General Hospital). She completed her MD at the University of Zurich in 2016 while being a Neurology resident. She then worked in the laboratory of Prof. Chaudhuri at King's College London on non-motor symptom in PD (2016-2018) before moving to Boston to join Dr. Gomez-Isla's laboratory at Harvard University where she is studying early neuroinflammatory changes in resilient/demented human AD brains (2020-present). She is currently pursuing her PhD with Prof. Duff at University College London and is doing a subspecialty training in dementia at Mass. General Hospital (Growdon Clinical Fellowship). She has also been the recipient of the Swiss Vontobel Prize 2022 for ageing and dementia. Her interests lie in understanding the role of neuroinflammation on early synapse loss in the human AD brain, and the possible contributors and mechanisms involved in dementia development in the early disease phases.

Giulio Taglialatela earned his MS in biological sciences in 1984 and his PhD in pharmacology in 1988, both at the University of Rome La Sapienza in Italy. After a two-year postdoctoral training at UTMB, TX, he joined UTMB in 1993 as a research assistant professor and rose through the ranks to his current appointment as a tenured professor and vice chair for research of the Department of Neurology and the director of the UTMB Mitchell Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, and was endowed as the Lawrence J. Del Papa Distinguished Chair in Neurodegenerative Disease Research. In 2022, he was further appointed director of the newly established UTMB Brain Health Institute. Continuously funded since 1995, the main research focus of Dr. Taglialatela’s group is to determine the molecular basis of brain/cognitive resilience in the face of AD pathology and to explore approaches to induce such resistance in anyone affected by the disease. Dr. Taglialatela’s group uses autopsy human brains, transgenic animal models and in vitro neuronal systems to interrogate basic molecular mechanisms of synaptic/neuronal resilience and focus on calcineurin inhibitors, neural stem cell derived exosomes (and their miRNA content) and near-infrared light as viable approaches to elicit it.

Sabina Tahirovic, Dr.rer.nat. conducted her doctoral thesis at the Center for Molecular Biology of Heidelberg University (ZMBH) and obtained her post-doctoral training at the Max-Planck-Institute of Neurobiology (MPI) in Martinsried. Since 2010, Dr. Tahirovic is a group leader at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) in Munich. Her research group integrates primary tissue culture and novel ex vivo models with in vivo, omics and translational approaches to identify molecular fingerprints of microglial dysfunction in Alzheimer´s disease. Recently, Dr. Tahirovic started characterizing microglial pathology in the childhood dementia disorder Niemann Pick type C (NPC) and obtained for this work a Neurodegeneration Research Award from the NCL & Joachim Herz Foundation. Major research goal of her team is to identify novel cellular targets that can “rejuvenate” microglial dysfunction and help in developing therapeutic approaches to monitor and target neuroinflammation.

Neuroscience

Dr. Talbot is a neurobiologist and postmortem investigator well known for his studies on the molecular basis of Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia for nearly twenty years. He received his Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscience from UCLA in 1989. After his years as a teacher at liberal arts colleges, Dr. Talbot pursued a full-time research career, starting with postdoctoral training in neurodegenerative disease research in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) from 1997-2001. He was then hired by the Department of Psychiatry at Penn as a senior research investigator from 2001 to 2007 and as a faculty member from 2008 to 2012. Between 2004 and 2012, his research led to two major discoveries: (1) that the first protein genetically linked to schizophrenia risk by positional cloning, dysbindin-1, is commonly reduced in synapses of schizophrenia cases and plays a role in their marked cognitive deficits and (2) that brain insulin resistance is a common feature in AD cases and is closely associated with their cognitive deficits. Since 2013, Dr. Talbot has continued his research in southern California as a faculty member at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, UCLA, and since 2018 at Loma Linda University Medical Center, where he is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Neurosurgery, Pathology and Human Anatomy, and Basic Sciences.

I have been working since 2014 at the Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences, and Society, Division of Neurogeriatrics. My research is based on characterizing new target proteins involved in the biological bases of Alzheimer's disease. In particular, I am studying the AD pathophysiological role of the intramembrane signal peptide peptidase like 2b (SPPL2b). For this purpose, we use the new AD mouse model, the APP-knock-in mouse AppNL-G-F and the SPPL2b deficient mouse line. The preliminary data show that SPLL2b is actively involved in AD pathophysiology, supporting the importance of SPPL2b as a new possible AD therapeutic target. My research is also concerned with evaluating the role of the endocannabinoidergic system (ECS) in neurological-related disorders and the biological mechanisms by which ECS is involved in neurodegenerative diseases such as AD. I have a multidisciplinary background that includes essentially all in vitro techniques for studies of brain morphology, immunohistochemistry, protein analyses, and extensive experience of in vivo behavioral tests in animal models of neurodegenerative disorders and, in particular, Alzheimer's disease. I am a co-supervising of a Ph.D. student, training master students, organizing seminars, and teaching in several Ph.D. courses.

Born in Turkey and raised in Germany, I studied biochemistry at Bayreuth University in Germany, at Imperial College in London, UK, and at University Denis Diderot in Paris, France (1991–1997). I obtained a PhD in molecular virology in the lab of Dr. Helmut Fickenscher at the Institute for Clinical and Molecular Virology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. In 2002, I joined Dr. Stanley Prusiner’s lab at UCSF in San Francisco, USA, where I investigated prion diseases at the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases as a postdoc and later as an Assistant Professor. In 2011, I started a lab at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) in Bonn, where I continued to study prions and synucleinopathies. Since 2019, I work at the Institute for Physical Biology at the Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf and the Institute for Biological Information Processing – Structural Biochemistry (IBI-7) at the Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, where I am a Professor for Protein Misfolding and Neurodegeneration. In my lab we are investigating prions, proteins alike, and associated neurodegenerative diseases, for which we are developing diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines.

Associate Researcher Neuroscience & Physiology Department University of Gothenburg

I am a postdoctoral research fellow at Oslo University Hospital. I am working on the genetics of Parkinson's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases.

Alice Tang is a bioengineer and data scientist with expertise in machine learning and bioinformatics. As a MD/PhD candidate at the University of California, San Francisco, she is working with Professor Marina Sirota to apply advanced machine learning techniques to electronic health records in order to gain insights into the complexities of neurodegeneration and heterogeneity. Alice is particularly interested in utilizing data-driven approaches on diverse data types to investigate disease pathogenesis and risks. As a future physician-scientist, Alice aims to leverage her expertise in machine learning and bioinformatics to drive innovative solutions and therapeutics that can improve human health. She is always looking to connect with individuals and is excited to network at the conference!

Dr. Yosuke Tanigawa is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Computational Biology Lab (PI: Prof. Manolis Kellis) at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. He obtained his BS in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology from the University of Tokyo and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Informatics from Stanford University. He develops statistical and computational methods for disease heterogeneity dissection, polygenic risk modeling, and therapeutic target discovery. He has received many awards for his research, including the Charles J. Epstein Trainee Awards for Excellence in Human Genetics Research from the American Society of Human Genetics in 2022 and MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 Japan Award in 2022. Personal website: https://yosuketanigawa.com/.

Malú Gámez Tansey, Ph.D. is the Co-Director of the Center for Translational Research in Neurodegenerative Disease at the University of Florida, as well as the Norman and Susan Fixel Chair in Neuroscience and Neurology, Investigator at the Evelyn F. and William L McKnight Brain Institute. lab focuses on the role of inflammation and immune system responses in brain health and the development of disease. She studies the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying neuroinflammation in neurological disorders with a long-term goal of developing better therapies to prevent and/or delay these diseases. Dr. Tansey obtained her B.S/M.S in Biological Sciences from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in Cell Regulation from UT Southwestern in Dallas, TX followed by post-doctoral work in neuroscience at Washington University Medical School. Prior to setting up her academic research lab in 2002 at UT Southwestern Medical Center in the Department of Physiology, she was head of the Chemical Genetics group at Xencor, a biotechnology company in Monrovia, working on novel TNF inhibitors that she used as tools in academia to investigate the role of neuroinflammation in neurodegenerative disease and which have now advanced to clinical trials in Alzheimer’s disease and COVID19 for cytokine storm. As a Hispanic American, Dr. Tansey serves as a role model to numerous undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate trainees, many of them women from underrepresented minority groups. She served as Co-Director of Emory’s Initiative for Maximizing Student Development (IMSD) whose mission is to strengthen institutional efforts to enhance recruitment and retention of diverse student and faculty bodies at Emory, by providing research training and mentoring opportunities to both. Dr. Tansey has earned several mentoring awards from students and faculty for her efforts in this area.

Dr. Rudolph Tanzi is the Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit, Co-Director of the McCance Center for Brain Health, Co-Director of the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, and Vice-Chair of Neurology (Research), at Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Tanzi co-discovered the first three Alzheimer’s disease genes, including APP and directs the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund Alzheimer’s Genome Project, which identified the first neuroinflammation-related Alzheimer’s gene, CD33. He has also been developing therapies for treating and preventing AD using 3D human neural glial culture models of AD and is now testing them in various clinical trials, including a gamma secretase modulator. Dr. Tanzi has published over 650 papers, received numerous awards, including the Metropolitan Life Award, Potamkin Prize, Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award, and was one of the TIME100 Most Influential People in the World. Dr. Tanzi is a New York Times bestselling author, who co-authored “Decoding Darkness” “Super Brain”, “Super Genes”, and “The Healing Self”. In his spare time, he plays keyboards for Joe Perry, Aerosmith and other musicians.

Hello, I am a clinical psychology doctoral student in Honolulu, Hawaii who's interested in how neurodegenerative disease alters behavior and cognitive functioning. My additional interests include neuropsychological assessment, cognitive rehabilitation, mTBI, and cognitive aging.