Towfique Raj, PhD, is a core faculty member in the Ronald M. Loeb Center for Alzheimer's Disease and an assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience and the Department of Genetics and Genomics at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. Dr. Raj received his PhD in genetics from Cambridge University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Broad Institute of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Harvard. Before joining Mount Sinai, Dr. Raj was an instructor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and a visiting scholar at Stanford University. Dr. Raj received the Gates-Cambridge Scholarship, NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Research Service Award and the Charleston Conference on Alzheimer's Disease Award. In his research, he uses powerful tools for genetic research and interdisciplinary approaches to understand the genetic factors driving neurodegenerative diseases with the ultimate goal of finding a cure. Dr. Raj's team aims to link genetic risk factors for Parkinson's disease (PD) to detectable changes in immune cells that may contribute to disease progression.