2026 Grand Challenges in Parkinson’s Disease

Nadine Ait-Bouziad completed her studies in Bioengineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and holds a Ph.D. in Neurosciences from EPFL. Passionate about neurosciences, she has over ten years of experience in neurodegenerative disease research across academic and industry environments. Nadine joined AC Immune in 2019 to lead the development and optimization of assays and supports the implementation of high‑throughput screening workflows for therapeutic programs targeting Parkinson’s disease and other a‑synucleinopathies. She also develops human‑relevant cellular models to investigate mechanisms of action, contributing to the discovery and refinement of novel therapeutic candidates.

Thomas Beach is Director of Neuroscience at Banner Sun Health Research Institute (BSHRI) in Sun City, Arizona. He was trained in neuroscience and neuropathology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and did clinical training at UBC, New York Medical College and St. Louis University. He was appointed Assistant Professor at UBC in 1993, moving to Phoenix, Arizona in 1997. Dr. Beach has been the recipient of multiple grants and awards from agencies including the National Institutes of Health, Alzheimer’s Association, the state of Arizona and the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. He has been Neuropathology Core Leader of the Arizona Alzheimer’s Disease Center since its inception in 2001. He has been an author on more than 500 publications listed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Additionally, he has served industry as a consultant and as a neuropathology core leader for several imaging-to-autopsy FDA-licensing clinical trials. His research is focused on elucidating early neuropathological stages and clinical biomarkers of normal human aging, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. His studies center on the structural and neurochemical changes of the human central and peripheral nervous system, through autopsy, biopsy and neuroimaging.

Veerle Baekelandt, Ph.D., is a neurobiologist and full professor at the faculty of medicine of the KU Leuven in Belgium. She heads the Laboratory for Neurobiology and Gene Therapy. The general interest of the lab concerns the molecular pathogenesis of Parkinson’s disease and related disorders. The approach consists of generating novel cellular and rodent models based on genes involved in familial forms of Parkinson’s disease, with the aim to better understand the pathogenesis of the disease. The final goal is to develop causal therapeutic strategies that can cure or slow down the disease. The lab is using viral vector technology, stereotactic neurosurgery and non-invasive molecular imaging as core technologies. Her current research focuses on the role of α-synuclein aggregation in Parkinson’s disease and multiple system atrophy, on the function of LRRK2, a kinase linked to Parkinson’s disease, and on the P-type ATPases ATP13A2 (PARK9) and ATP10B in the context of the ASAP international collaborative research network project IMPACT-PD. Dr. Baekelandt is recognized internationally for the application of viral vectors in the rodent brain to model and study Parkinson’s disease. She has also contributed to groundbreaking research demonstrating a prion-like behavior of the α-synuclein protein.

Dr. Brundin joined Roche in 2022, where he is Therapeutic Area Leader for Movement Disorders, leading discovery research and early development (including Phase II trials) for Parkinson’s (PD) and Huntington’s (HD) diseases. Prior to this, he was at Van Andel Institute, where he was Deputy Chief Scientific Officer and Director of the Parkinson’s Disease Center from 2012 to 2022. He earned his Ph.D. in 1988 and M.D. in 1992, both from Lund University, Sweden, where he also was a full professor 2000-2014. He is highly cited in neuroscience with more than 440 publications, mostly on PD and HD. He contributed to the development and optimization of neural transplantation technology and played a key role in pioneering clinical cell transplantation trials in PD. In addition, his team made several important contributions to the understanding of pathogenesis of HD and PD. He led the seminal discovery of Lewy pathology in grafted neurons in patients and first suggested that alpha-synuclein aggregates propagate between neurons in a prion-like manner in PD. He developed unique animal models of the spread of pathology, mimicking the brain in prodromal PD and he highlighted alpha-synuclein as a therapeutic target for disease-modifying therapies. In 2011-2022, he chaired the International Linked Clinical Trials committee, which pioneered a large program for drug repurposing in PD. He has held several research leadership roles, including being a member of the World Parkinson Coalition Board of Directors and the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research Executive Scientific Advisory Board, and advisor for Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s Research. He also served as founding co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease (2011-2022) and is a scientific co-founder of Acousort AB and Kenai Therapeutics (developing iPSC-based transplantation therapy for PD).

Valina Lynn Dawson, Ph.D., is a professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, Physiology, Pharmacology and Therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of the Neuroregeneration and Stem Cell Programs in the Institute for Cell Engineering. Trained in environmental toxicology (B.S., University of California at Davis) and pharmacology (Ph.D., University of Utah School of Medicine), she leads a multidisciplinary research program defining molecular mechanisms of neurodegeneration and translating these insights into therapies for Parkinson’s disease and related movement disorders. Her seminal work on nitric oxide and cell death pathways has informed current concepts of neurotoxicity and neuronal survival. Dr. Dawson is an internationally recognized leader in Parkinson’s disease research, with a Google Scholar h-index of 167 and repeated recognition as a Highly Cited Researcher by Web of Science and Clarivate Analytics. Her honors include the Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award, election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Heart Association and the National Academy of Inventors, and multiple “Best Scientist” awards in neuroscience, biology, and biochemistry. She is deeply committed to training the next generation of investigators, having mentored numerous graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who now contribute to advancing therapies for Parkinson’s disease.

Saranna Fanning is an Assistant Professor in Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Brigham & Women’s Hospital. Dr. Fanning received her B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Microbiology from University College Cork (UCC), Ireland, performing her doctoral research at UCC (in the lab of Prof. Douwe van Sinderen), Columbia University, NY (with Prof. Aaron Mitchell), and Carnegie Mellon University, PA. She performed her postdoctoral training in the lab of Dr. Susan Lindquist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, MIT, MA, and Dr. Dennis Selkoe’s Lab at Harvard Medical School and Brigham & Women’s Hospital. As an Assistant Professor, her lab investigates the role of lipid metabolism in neurodegenerative diseases. She is particularly focused on identifying therapeutic targets for Parkinson’s disease (PD).

Fanni Geibl earned her M.D. from Semmelweis University in Budapest, Hungary (2016), followed by a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from University of Marburg, Germany (2019). She subsequently completed a postdoctoral training at Northwestern University in Chicago (2020-2021), where she further developed her expertise in circuit-based models of neurodegeneration.

Upon returning to Germany, she established the research group Cellular Neuropsychiatry while starting her clinical training in psychiatry. Currently, she practices as a psychiatrist in the specialized outpatient clinic for dementia and neurodegenerative disorders while leading her laboratory. As a Clinician Scientist, her work integrates mechanistic experimental neuroscience with patient-oriented clinical work, with particular focus on Lewy body dementia and related a-synucleinopathies.

Her laboratory investigates the cellular and network-level determinants of selective neuronal vulnerability and disease progression in a-synucleinopathies. Her research efforts center on mitochondrial bioenergetics, protein aggregation dynamics, neuroimmune interactions, and systemic modulators of pathology. By combining advanced in vivo disease models with direct clinical insight, her team seeks to define biologically grounded mechanisms that can inform vulnerability-targeted and disease-modifying therapeutic strategies for prodromal and manifest Lewy body disorders.

Dr. Jensen became a medical doctor from Aarhus University in 1989 and completed a medical internship from 1992-1994 at Aarhus University Hospital. He has been employed at Aarhus University since 1992. Since 2004, he has been a professor in medical biochemistry, currently at the Department of Biomedicine. He was visiting scientist in Dr. Carlos Dotti’s laboratory at European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany, from 1997-1998. He earned a Dr. of Medical Sciences (equivalent to Ph.D.) in 1998 from Aarhus University. He served as Head of Department of Medical Biochemistry, University of Aarhus, from 2001-2011. Since 2013, he has served as core-principal investigator and founding member of DANDRITE, the Danish Center for Translation Neuroscience, a part of the EMBL Nordic Nodes in Translational Medicine, and since 2024, director hereof. In 2025, he became cofounder of SynuCa Therapeutics, which develops disease-modifying small molecules targeting Ca2+ regulating proteins.

Since 2025, he has been founding member and senior core group leader of Lundbeck Foundation Parkinson’s Disease Research Center PACE at Aarhus University Hospital, where he also is affiliated professor at the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University.
His research focus covers all areas related to a-synuclein aggregation from molecules to clinical studies with a focus on modifiable disease mechanisms and development of tools.
Dr. Jensen has published over 147 original research papers.

Gabor G. Kovacs, M.D., Ph.D., is Professor of Neuropathology and Neurology at the University of Toronto, Consultant Neuropathologist and Neurologist at the University Health Network, and Principal Investigator at the Tanz Centre for Research in Neurodegenerative Disease. He holds the Rossy Chair for PSP Research. Dr. Kovacs completed medical school and specialized in Neurology and Neuropathology at Semmelweis University in Budapest, Hungary, where he also earned a Ph.D. in Neuroscience. Before moving to Toronto, he was Associate Professor at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, and led the Hungarian and Austrian surveillance programs for human prion diseases for over a decade. Dr. Kovacs’s research focuses on molecular pathological patterns underlying neurodegenerative diseases, selective neuronal vulnerability, and mechanisms of aging and neurodegeneration. His work integrates advanced molecular approaches, digital pathology and global collaborations, contributing to international consensus criteria for multiple neurodegenerative disorders, including tauopathies, TDP-43 proteinopathies and Lewy body diseases. His studies draw heavily on biobank samples and support biomarker development such as seed amplification assays. Dr. Kovacs has published over 400 peer-reviewed papers and edited major neuropathology textbooks, including the latest edition of Greenfield’s Neuropathology.

Kalpana Merchant is a translational neuroscientist with over 30 years of experience in drug discovery and development for neurological disorders. She retired from Eli Lilly as Chief Scientific Officer for Tailored Therapeutics–Neuroscience. Prior to Lilly, she spent a decade in neuroscience research at Upjohn/Pharmacia/Pfizer. Kalpana has co-founded biopharma companies and served as Chief Executive/Chief Scientific Officer at start-up companies. Currently, she serves on Boards of Directors, Scientific Advisory Boards and as a consultant in the biopharma sector. She is an Adjunct Professor of Neurology at Northwestern University. She has been an advisor to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s research for nearly 20 years and serves on the executive steering committee for the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative. She has been appointed to the Oregon Innovation Council, serves as a trustee of the Portland Community College Foundation and has served on advisory boards/council at the National Institutes of Health. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Utah and held faculty roles at the University of Washington.

Dr. Merz is an adjunct assistant professor in the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases (IND) at UCSF. His group uses cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) to solve atomic-resolution structures of amyloid filaments formed in patients with neurodegenerative diseases and in animal and cellular systems used to model those diseases. Dr. Merz also focuses on small molecule binding to amyloids, and recently was the first to describe a novel small molecule-protein interaction in which aromatic small molecules bound to amyloid filaments “tilt” to simultaneous satisfy the translational requirements of binding while also stacking to form highly favorable ligand-ligand pi-pi interactions. This motif holds promise for the design and development of diagnostics and therapeutics to treat neurodegeneration. His group has also discovered novel folds of both tau and alpha-synuclein in filaments purified from patients with familial FTDs and MSA. Prior to his faculty appointment at UCSF, Dr. Merz was a postdoc at UCSF working jointly with Dr. Dan Southworth and Dr. Stanely Prusiner. He obtained his Ph.D. in chemistry and chemical biology from Cornell University, under advisor Dr. Brian Crane, where he focused on other structural and spectroscopic techniques, including x-ray crystallography and electron paramagnetic resonance.

Caryl Sortwell is Professor, Associate Chair and Edwin A. Brophy Endowed Chair in Central Nervous System Disorders in the Department of Translational Neuroscience at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine Campus in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She received her B.S. in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1987 and her Ph.D. in Anatomy and Cell Biology in 1994 from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Caryl studies the consequences of alpha-synuclein inclusions on neuronal function and neuroinflammation, and investigates therapeutic approaches to reverse or slow these consequences. Caryl is committed to the development of quality processes to improve predoctoral and postdoctoral mentoring. Outside of the lab, she enjoys spending time with her family, poodles and horses.

Dr. Soto is the Huffington Distinguished University Chair, Professor of Neurology and Director of the Mitchell Center for Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Brain Disorders at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, McGovern Medical School. He is also the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Amprion Inc. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of Chile in 1993 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Catholic University of Chile and at the New York University School of Medicine, where he became an assistant professor of research in 1995. Between 1999 and 2003, Dr. Soto was Senior Scientist, Chairman of the Department of Molecular Neurobiology and Senior Executive Scientific Advisor for Neurobiology at Serono International in Switzerland. Between 2003 and 2008, he served as Director of the George and Cynthia Mitchell Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

Dr. Soto has been working in the field of neurodegenerative diseases, in particular in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and prion diseases for the past 30 years and has made several important discoveries both to the basic science understanding of these diseases and to the translation of this knowledge into novel strategies for treatment and early diagnosis. He invented and developed the Protein Misfolding Cyclic Amplification (PMCA) and the Seed Amplification Assay (SAA) technologies for ultra-sensitive detection of misfolded proteins and beta-sheet breaker approach to produce therapeutic compounds for various protein misfolding disorders. He also contributed to understanding that protein misfolding diseases have the intrinsic ability to be transmissible and that misfolded protein aggregates can adopt alternative conformations, usually referred to as conformational strains. Also, he has been studying the use of induced pluripotent stem cells for regenerative therapy as well as developing novel cellular (including 3D cerebral organoids) and animal models of these diseases. Dr. Soto has published more than 250 peer review publications, which have been cited more than 40,000 times (H index 98). According to Google scholar, 99 articles have >100 citations, 59 >200, 16 >500 and 6 have >1000. Dr. Soto has received >$60 million dollars funding from NIH and private foundations over the past 20 years.

Wilma D.J. Van de Berg is a professor in cellular neurodegeneration and Parkinson’s disease at Amsterdam UMC, Vrije University, Amsterdam. She is a cellular neuroscientist, neuroanatomist, head of the research section Clinical Neuroanatomy and Biobanking, member of the steering committee of the Amsterdam Parkinson and Movement Disorders Center and leader of the program Neurodegeneration at the Amsterdam Neuroscience Institute. She is an expert in multiscale high-end microscopy of human brain tissue and focuses on understanding α-synuclein cellular biology and lysosomal dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease and related neurodegenerative disorders. She is a founder and director of the Normal Aging Brain Collection Amsterdam (NABCA) and leads the longitudinal multicenter cohort study “Profiling Parkinson’s’”(ProPARK) and Netherlands Parkinson cohort (NPC) biobank. She is involved in several international initiatives (PD-RISK, GP2, QSYN, ASAP) to improve early diagnostics and develop therapeutic strategies to slow down Parkinson’s. She is the president of the Dutch Parkinson’s Disease Association and member of the executive board of the Parkinsonalliance Netherlands.

Dr. Michael Henderson investigates why some neurons and brain circuits are resilient while others are vulnerable to diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and dementia with Lewy bodies. By uncovering the factors behind these differences, he aims to identify new opportunities to prevent or slow disease progression.

Dr. Darren Moore seeks new diagnostic and treatment approaches for Parkinson’s by investigating genetic risk factors and a range of inherited forms of the disease, which comprise 5% to 10% of cases. He aims to translate the understanding of these genetic mutations and risk factors into new disease-modifying treatments and biomarkers for Parkinson’s, both inherited and sporadic forms. Discoveries from Dr. Moore’s lab routinely elucidate the faulty molecular interactions that transform healthy, functioning neurons into diseased ones.

Dr. Yang Yang employs the latest imaging technologies to illuminate new insights into neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Her research has revealed the structures of critical disease-related protein filaments — an important step toward developing improved treatments.