Dr. Albert La Spada is a physician-scientist and has worked on neurodegenerative disease more than 25 years. He discovered the first CAG-polyglutamine repeat expansion mutation. Dr. La Spada has created numerous pre-clinical models and studied transcriptional dysregulation in brain disorders. He has generated cell culture and primary neuron models for neurodegenerative disorders and is adept at developing and characterizing stem cell models. Dr. La Spada has applied emerging genomics, proteomics, and metabolic techniques to the study of neurobiology and neuropathology. His research program has a significant translational and therapeutic portfolio, based upon mechanistic insights and target pathways that he identified.

He has been named a Paul Beeson Physician-Faculty Scholar, inducted into the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians, bestowed with a Gund-Harrington Scholar award, and was recently selected for the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative’s Neurodegeneration Challenge Network.