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Mark Cookson, PhD - Executive Committee
Chief, Cell Biology and Gene Expression
National Institute on Aging
Bethesda, Maryland

Dr. Cookson received both his B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Salford, UK in 1991 and 1995, respectively. His postdoctoral studies included time spent at the Medical Research Council laboratories and at the University of Newcastle, Newcastle, UK. He joined the Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, Florida, as an Assistant Professor in 2000 and moved to the National Institute on Aging at NIH Bethesda, MD in 2002. Within the Laboratory of Neurogenetics, Dr. Cookson's group works on movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease, attempting to understand mechanisms leading to neuronal damage. The group uses cellular and molecular biology techniques to model how the effects of mutations in genes associated with familial forms of PD (alpha-synuclein, parkin, DJ-1, PINK1 and dardarin) affect protein function. Dr Cookson has published over 50 original papers and several review articles. He is currently a member of the editorial board for Neurobiology of Disease.