Alpha-Synuclein in Parkinson's Disease

Prof. Le is the Director of the Academic Committee of Medical School of University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Director of Neurology Department & Institute in Sichuan Academy of Medical Science-Sichuan Provincial Hospital. He also works as life-time Tenured Professor & Head of the top clinical discipline in Dalian Medical University. From 2006-2013, Dr. Le served as a Professor of Neurology and Director of the Parkinson's Disease Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine, where he was rewarded 3 NIH RO-1. He once worked as the Director of the Institute of Neurology at Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine and the Executive Chairman of the Biomedical Institute of Shanghai Ruijin Hospital, and 100-talent professor of neurogenomic laboratory, Institute of Health Science, Chinese Academy of Science.
Prof. Le interests in the research on pathogenesis, biomarkers and the targeted therapy of neurodegenerative diseases. He has published more than 350 papers in internationally important academic journals, such as Nature Genetics, Science, PNAS, Autophagy, Brain, JAMA, Lancet Neurology, etc. His papers were cited over 38,000 times and he has been chosen into the list of Highly Cited Chinese Researchers in the field of Neuroscience by Elsevier for 9 years (H-index 89). Prof. Le held 3 Key Programs and 6 General Programs of National Natural Science Foundation of China, held/participated in 4 Key Projects of Chinese National Programs for Fundamental Research and Development (973 program) and Chinese National Programs for High Technology Research and Development (863 program).

Dr. Ted Dawson received his medical degree and Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Utah School of Medicine. He then completed an internship in medicine at the University of Utah Affiliated Hospitals before going to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania for a neurology residency. Next, he came to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where he completed a fellowship in neuroscience and a senior clinical fellowship in movement disorders. Dr. Dawson’s honors include the Derek Denny-Brown Young Neurological Scholar Award, the Paul Beeson Physician Faculty Scholar Award, the Santiago Grisolia Medal, and a Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award.  He was elected to the Association of American Physicians and he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Neurological Association, the American Academy of Neurology, and the American Heart Association. He is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. Dr. Dawson's laboratory focuses on neurodegenerative diseases. He pioneered the role of nitric oxide (NO) in neuronal injury in stroke, glutamate excitotoxicity and Parkinson’s disease.  He elucidated the molecular mechanisms by which NO kills neurons through the actions of poly (ADP-ribose) (PAR) polymerase and discovered a unique cell death pathway designated parthanatos.  His laboratory has made important discoveries on how neurons die in genetic and sporadic models of Parkinson’s disease.  Dr. Dawson’s discoveries are enabling clinical strategies for disease modifying therapies for Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease as well as other neurodegenerative diseases.

The research of Dr. Cong Liu focuses on protein phase separation and pathological aggregation in neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) with systematical achievements during his independent research career since 2013. In brief, by combining cutting-edge chemical and biological approaches, Dr. Liu revealed the structural basis of protein pathological aggregation in NDs; demonstrated the regulation mechanism of protein aggregation by disease-related chemical modification; explained at the atomic level how small molecules bind to pathological amyloid fibril; developed new strategies of small molecules modulating protein phase separation for therapeutic application.  
Over the past 5 years, Dr. Liu totally published over 80 SCI papers. As the corresponding or co-corresponding author, he published over 50 papers, including Cell, PNAS (7), Nat Struct & Mol Biol (3), Nat Chem Biol (2), JACS (2), Cell Research (5), Nat Commun (9), Angew, Mol Cell, Dev Cell, and Sci Adv.