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Dr. Hilal A. Lashuel received his B.Sc. degree in chemistry from the City University of New York in 1994 and completed his doctoral studies at Texas A&M University and the Scripps Research Institute in 2000. In 2001, he moved to Harvard Medical School and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital as a research fellow in the Center for Neurologic Diseases and was later promoted to an instructor in neurology at Harvard Medical School. In 2005, Dr. Lashuel moved Switzerland to join the Brain Mind Institute at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) as a tenure-track assistant professor in neurosciences, where he currently is an associate professor of life sciences and the director of the laboratory of molecular and chemical biology of neurodegeneration. 

Dr. Lashuel is an expert in biochemistry of neurodegeneration-related aggregation prone proteins, including alpha-synuclein, tau, huntingtin. He has more than 120 peer-review publications in high-quality peer-review journals.  He holds three patents on novel strategies for preventing protein aggregation and treating autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. Dr. Lashuel is the recipient of Human Science Frontiers young investigator research award, the European Research Council (ERC) starting independent researcher grant and the ERC proof of concept award (2013), Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (2012), the Michael J. Fox Foundation Parkinson’s disease Grand Challenge Award, Kuwait Prize in fundamental Sciences (Biological Sciences, 2018), Takreem Foundation Scientific and Technological Achievements Award (2019),  and H. Martin Friedman Distinguished Lecture (2020). In addition, Hilal Lashuel is the founder of ND BioSciences, a biotechnology startup established in 2019 developing technologies and services for the development of early diagnostics and therapies for neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. 

Lashuel research group 

@LashuelLab 

Welcome to this exciting seminar!  

Safak Er 

NOTE: For PhD (or Master’s) students, there are few spaces available for student lunch with Dr Lashuel at Viikki. Please email safak.er@helsinki.fi if you want to join! 

Selected publications: 

Riguet, N., Mahul-Mellier, AL., Maharjan, N. et al (2021).. Nuclear and cytoplasmic huntingtin inclusions exhibit distinct biochemical composition, interactome and ultrastructural properties. Nat Commun 12, 6579. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-26684-z  

Lashuel, H. A. (2021). Rethinking protein aggregation and drug discovery in neurodegenerative diseases. Current Opinion in Chemical Biology 64: 67-75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cbpa.2021.05.006 

Mahul-Mellier, A.-L., Burtscher, J., Maharjan, N., Weerens, L., Croisier, M., Kuttler, F., Leleu, M., Knott, G. W., & Lashuel, H. A. (2020). The process of Lewy Body Formation, rather than simply α-synuclein fibrillization, is one of the major drivers of neurodegeneration. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(9), 4971–4982. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1913904117 

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University of Helsinki students please note: If you wish to obtain credits (DPBM, ILS) from this webinar series, please rename yourself in Zoom with first name + last name (do not use nickname/user ID/student number/just first name).