Mathias Jucker

Mathias Jucker is a is Professor of Cell Biology of Neurological Diseases at the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research at the University of Tübingen and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE). He received his PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow and researcher at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, USA, and was appointed to his current position in Tübingen in 2003. His laboratory has made several important contributions to the empirical and conceptual foundations of brain disorders, e.g., in promoting the prion paradigm as a unifying pathogenic principle for most age-related neurodegenerative diseases. He has become an opinion leader in the field with invited reviews for Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Neuroscience, Cell, and Scientific American. Particularly noteworthy are his efforts to translate fundamental research into clinical applications, as exemplified by his commitment to the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network (DIAN; www.dian-info.org), of which he is the coordinator in Germany. Along with his scientific achievements, Mathias Jucker has been successful in promoting young researchers. He is Speaker of the Graduate School of Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience in Tübingen, Germany, and has supervised more than thirty doctoral students, many of whom have now themselves become group leaders and professors at renowned research institutions.