Peter Heutink, PhD

Peter Heutink has led teams that identified mutations in genes for Parkinson’s disease (PD), frontotemporal dementia, chorea, ataxia, hemochromatosis, porencephaly and various developmental disorders. He has made important contributions to GWAS for major depression, Tourette Syndrome, obsessive compulsive disorders, frontotemporal dementia and PD and is one of the PIs of the International Parkinson’s Disease Genomics Consortium and the speaker of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE)-Tübingen. His research focuses on genomic approaches to understanding neurodegenerative disease and he is a core member of the FANTOM project, which aims to improve the functional annotation of the human genome. FANTOM published several landmark papers, that will be essential to understand the biology underlying the increasing number of genetic risk factors for human diseases. His group has developed automated high-throughput cellular screening methodologies to investigate large numbers of genetic variations in their cellular context.