Chairs & Speakers

Colin Espie is the Professor of Sleep Medicine in the Sir Jules Thorne Sleep & Circadian Neurosciences Institute, University of Oxford, Founding Director of the Oxford Experimental & Clinical Sleep Medicine research programme, and Clinical Director of the Oxford Course in Sleep Medicine. He is affiliated with the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, is a Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry. He is an Emeritus Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Glasgow. He is internationally known for his work on insomnia and its treatment, using cognitive behavioural therapeutics (CBTx), has published over 300 scientific papers and several textbooks, is Deputy Editor of Journal of Sleep Research, and serves on the editorial board of Sleep Medicine Reviews. He was awarded the Mary A. Carskadon Outstanding Educator Award by the Sleep Research Society (2017), and the Peter Hauri Lifetime Scientific Achievement Award by the Society of Behavioral Sleep Medicine (2021). Colin is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, and an Honorary Fellow of the BABCP (British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies) and of the Royal College of General Practitioners. Colin is actively involved in print, TV and social media (@ProfEspie) regarding the science of sleep. He also co-founded of the website bighealth.com the developer of SleepioTM a digital CBT intervention which is now widely available in the NHS-UK and in the US healthcare system.

Gabriele Lignani is Professor of Translational Neuroscience at UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology in the Department of Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy. He received his PhD in 2012 in Experimental Neuroscience from the University of Genoa and he did his first postdoc at the Italian Institute of Technology. Then he moved to UCL for his second postdoc and was awarded a Marie-Curie individual fellowship to develop new CRISPR-based editing tools to treat epilepsy. In 2018 he started his own lab as Epilepsy Research UK Emerging Leader to further develop novel gene therapies for epilepsy. He then obtained an MRC New Investigator Award to develop new CRISPR-based technologies, recently an ERC Consolidator Grant, and several other discovery and translational grants. He is board member of several committees and Associate editor for Frontiers in Gene Editing and Contributing Editor for Epilepsy Currents; he also leads the Athena Swan initiative for gender balance in his Institute. Recently he has been awarded the Harinarayan Young Scientist Award by ILAE for his research in gene therapy for epilepsy, and the Michael Prize 2023 for the best scientific contribution to progress in the field of experimental epilepsy. The focus of his lab is to develop gene therapy and editing techniques for neurological disorders, to study the role of homeostatic plasticity in epilepsy and understand the basic epileptic mechanisms.

Dr Rita Horvath is a clinical academic who was trained as a neurologist in Budapest, Hungary and completed her PhD on mitochondrial disease. She started laboratory research at the Montreal Neurological Institute as a visiting scientist. She has been working in mitochondrial diagnostic and research in Munich. Since 2007 she has been working at the Mitochondrial Research Centre at Newcastle University, and since 2018 at the Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge. The focus of her research is to identify key molecular disease mechanisms with the aim of developing treatments for patients with rare inherited neurological conditions, such as mitochondrial disease and CMT. Dr Horvath is also a guarantor for Guarantors of Brain.

Alasdair Coles is Professor of Neuroimmunology at the University of Cambridge. His research is on treatments for multiple sclerosis, at first on anti-inflammatory treatments (especially alemtuzumab) and now on experimental reparative therapies. He also leads a trial of immunotherapy in autoantibody-associated psychosis. His clinical practice is in multiple sclerosis and other neuroimmunological diseases. He has a side-interest in how neurological diseases affect spirituality.

Vladyslav Vyazovskiy graduated from Kharkiv National University, Ukraine, in 1997, and in 2004 he received his PhD degree at the University of Zurich. Following postdoctoral and lecturership positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Surrey University, he joined the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at the University of Oxford in 2013 as a Senior Research Fellow, before becoming Associate Professor of Neuroscience in 2015 and Professor of Sleep Physiology in 2021. Since 2020, he is a Tutorial Fellow in Medicine at Hertford College, and is a member of Sir Jules Thorn Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute (SCNi) and Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery.

Professor Dr. Matthis Synofzik, MD, is head of the research unit “Translational Genomics of neurodegenerative diseases” and senior consultant neurologist at the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research & Center of Neurology, University of Tübingen, Germany. He leads the outpatient clinics for Frontotemporal Dementias and for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, and is co-chair of the Ataxia outpatient clinics at the Center for Neurology. Using latest next-generation genomic sequencing techniques, he has been leading or involved in the identification of >20 novel ataxia and spastic paraplegia (HSP) genes in the last 10 years. Matthis leads several worldwide EU-funded consortia on rare neurological diseases like PREPARE, PROSPAX and EVIDENCE-RND. He is Chair of the global trial-readiness platform “ATAXIA GLOBAL INITIATIVE”- a worldwide multicenter translational initiative to pave the way for all crucial translational steps from NGS genetic fingerprinting to FDA-conform trial-readiness cohorts of ataxia patients. Theses large-scale endeavours allow his group to directly draw on large global patient, biomaterial, NGS datasets and outcome measure modelling to inform comprehensive and thorough development and evaluation of individualized n-of-1 ASO treatments. As part of the steering committee of the 1 MUTATION 1 MEDICINE (1M1M) consortium (https://www.1mutation1medicine.eu), he has already charted the path to establish this exciting novel therapy approach of ultra-individualized ASO treatments in Europe (Synofzik et al, 2021, Nucleic Acid Therapy). This work is paralleled by his leadership work in the transatlantic IRDiRC N-of-1 Taskforce (https://irdirc.org/preparing-for-genetic-n-of-1-treatments-of-patients-with-ultra-rare-mutations/) as well as transatlantic N-of-1 Collaborative (N1C) (https://www.n1collaborative.org). His lab is developing a scalable platform for n-of-1 ASOs for severe brain diseases, from bedside to bench to bedside, with Ataxia teleangiectasia (A-T) as a forerunner showcase disease.

Cath Mummery is a consultant neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. She is chair of the NIHR Dementia Translational Research Collaboration, building a national unified trials network for early phase clinical trials and working with the Mission to accelerate and enhance dementia translational research in novel treatments. She is Head of Clinical Trials at the Dementia Research Centre at University College London, and Deputy Director for the Leonard Wolfson Experimental Neurology Centre. She has been chief investigator on over 20 early phase drug trials of potential disease modifying agents in sporadic Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and genetic forms of AD and frontotemporal dementia. As clinical lead for the UCL Neurogenetic Therapies Programme, she leads a programme of innovative collaboration between industry and academia to accelerate progress in genetic therapies in dementia. Her driving ambition is to ensure we not only have treatments that can alter the course of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, but that we can deliver them promptly,safely and equitably.

Dr Steffen Tiedt studied medicine at LMU and Harvard. Intrigued by courses on neurophysiology, he conducted his MD thesis with Dr. Magdalena Götz, exploring the role of STAT-signalling on the neurogenic potential of reactive astrocytes. In 2013, Dr Tiedt joined the group of Martin Dichgans at the ISD as a clinician-scientist conducting a joint program: a PhD in Neuroscience at the Graduate School of Systemic Neuroscience and residency in Clinical Neurology. During the PhD he initiated the PRecisiOn Medicine In StrokE (PROMISE) and CIRCULAting biomarkers after Stroke (CIRCULAS) studies, which are among the largest studies world-wide with early and serial blood sampling in patients with acute stroke (N>2,000). Utilizing these resources, Dr Tiedt and his team were the first to employ RNA sequencing for the identification of circulating miRNAs associated with stroke and to apply single-molecule array (Simoa) technology during the course of stroke (publications in Circulation Research and Neurology). Based on this work, Dr Tiedt’s lab now utilizes profiling, ultrasensitive single-molecule, and point-of-care technologies to identify meaningful signatures to improve stroke care and explores underlying molecular and pathophysiological mechanisms in experimental settings.

Dr Zahraa Al-Ahmady is an Associate Professor at the Pharmacology Department, Nottingham Trent University, UK. She also holds an honorary research fellow position at the University of Manchester, UK. She obtained her BSc Degree in Pharmacy from the College of Pharmacy, the University of Baghdad in 2004. After training as a clinical pharmacist, she moved to the United Kingdom to study for the Master in Drug Delivery at UCL School of Pharmacy, where she won the AstraZeneca Prize for the best overall performance. Zahraa completed her PhD studies with the Nanomedicine Lab at UCL School of Pharmacy on the design, characterization and biological performance of temperature-sensitive vesicles for cancer therapy in 2012. She then joined the NANOSOLUTIONS (FP7-NMP) European project as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Manchester. Her work was mainly focused on the structure–biological function relationship that determines the safety of engineered nanomaterials. Following that she worked as a research fellow with the North West Centre of Advanced Drug Delivery (NoWCADD), a joint post between the division of pharmacy at the University of Manchester, the Nanomedicine Lab and AstraZeneca, working on the development of innovative therapeutic and in vivo imaging approaches. Dr Al-Ahmady's lab explores effective and efficient delivery approaches for neuroimmunology and oncology applications.

Florian Mormann is Professor of Cognitive and Clinical Neurophysiology in Department of Epileptology, University of Bonn. His research group's research interests are Cognitive Neurophysiology and Clinical Neurophysiology. For Cognitive Neurophysiology, the focus is in the neurobiology of perception and memory. The group explores neuronal behavior in the medial temporal lobe to understand how conscious perceptions are transferred into episodic memory traces. In Clinical Neurophysiology, his group investigates the pathophysiological mechanisms that lead to the occurrence of epileptic seizures, particularly on microscopic phenomena such as high frequency oscillations, micro-seizures, cellular and network behaviour.

Dr. Hanna Willis is a neuroscientist who specialises in understanding visual loss and the brain. She earned her PhD from the University of Oxford where she worked with Professor Holly Bridge and focussed on rehabilitating visual loss after a stroke. She continues to work as a postdoctoral researcher in the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging at the University of Oxford developing methods to optimise the effects of visual rehabilitation after occipital stroke.

Lucie Barateau (MD, PhD) is Associate Professor since September 2021 in the Sleep Unit of Montpellier University Hospital, National Reference Center for Narcolepsy and Rare Hypersomnias in France, where she is working as a neurologist. She is investigator and co-investigator of several clinical trials, pathophysiological studies, and pharmaceutical protocols in the Sleep Unit, with an affiliation to the Institute of Neurosciences of Montpellier (INM), University of Montpellier (INSERM). She studies the pathophysiological mechanisms, electrophysiological and biological biomarkers, and therapeutic management optimization in these rare sleep disorders, and especially in narcolepsy. She also has an important clinical activity, with the diagnosis, management and follow-up of patients suffering from central disorders of hypersomnolence. She is a member of several Research Societies: SFRMS (French Sleep Medicine Research Society, member of the Scientific Committee), ESRS (European Sleep Research Society), EAN (European Academy of neurology), EU-NN (European Narcolepsy Network, member of the Scientific Committee), and she received several awards: Young Scientist Award, EUNN, 2017; Young Investigator Award, World Sleep Society (WSS) 2017 and 2019; Young Scientist Award, First Price, 7th International Narcolepsy Meeting, 2018. She is author and co-author of 80 publications in international peer-reviewed journals, mostly on the topic of hypersomnolence and narcolepsy.

Professor David Hunt is a Wellcome Senior Clinical Fellow and Consultant Neurologist who leads clinics and research in neuroimmunological diseases. He trained at Cambridge University with postdoctoral periods at UCL and the MRC Human Genetics Unit in Edinburgh supported by Brain and Wellcome. David’s lab studies how activation of the innate immune system causes brain disease, with a particular focus on the antiviral type I interferon response. His work combines novel ultrasensitive biomarkers with modelling approaches, and has showed how aberrant cytokine production from different sources causes specific patterns of neurological disease. This has impacts on biomarker development, therapeutic approaches and drug safety. David leads NHS clinical services in Edinburgh for common and rare neuroimmunological diseases and serves as a Commissioner on the Commission for Human Medicines.

Dr Arman Eshaghi is a National Institute of Health and Care Research Fellow at University College London and an Affiliate Member of the Montreal Neurological Institute in Canada. His current research is focused on developing advanced artificial intelligence models using brain and spinal cord imaging and electronic health records from hospitals in the UK, Canada and the Netherlands. He obtained his medical doctorate degree (M.D) in 2013 from the Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran and his PhD in Computational Neuroscience from University College London in 2018 in the UK. He was awarded the Young Investigator of the Year in 2016 by the European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ECTRIMS). He was awarded the Jacqueline du Pré Grant in 2011, ECTRIMS-MAGNIMS Fellowship in 2015, and the Multiple Sclerosis International Federation's Ian McDonald Fellowship in 2016. He serves on the Editorial Board of Neurology, which is the official journal of the American Academy of Neurology.