Scientific Advisory Board
Merit Cudkowicz
MD, MSC
Dr. Merit Cudkowicz is the Director of the Sean M. Healey & AMG Center for ALS, Chairof Neurology at Mass General, and the Julieanne Dorn Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Cudkowicz’s research and clinical activities are dedicated to the study and treatment of people with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). Dr. Cudkowicz is one of the founders and past Co-Chairs of the Northeast ALS Consortium (NEALS), a group of over 145 clinical sites in the United States, Canada, Europe and the Middle East dedicated to performing collaborative clinical trials and research in ALS. She has brought innovations to accelerate the development of treatments for people with ALS rapidly.
Caroline Ingre
MD PhD
Dr Caroline Ingre is an Associate Professor and Research Group Leader, ALS, at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet. She is a specialist in neuromuscular disease and have been working with ALS for more than 10 years.
Caroline has initiated several collaborations between Universities and University Hospitals in Sweden and hosts the national clinical ALS meeting. She also leads an ALS research group at Karolinska Institute with main interests in epidemiology, risk and prognosis of ALS disease, the development of imaging methods, biomarker studies and psychological influence on ALS.
Jeremy Shefner
MD, PhD
Jeremy Shefner, MD, PhD, is a neurologist in the Gregory W. Fulton ALS & Neuromuscular Disease Center and professor in the Department of Neurology at Barrow Neurological Institute. He is board certified in neurology by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and he specializes in ALS and neuromuscular disorders.
Dr. Shefner’s research focuses on biomarker development and the clinical therapeutics of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and spinal muscular atrophy. He co-founded the Northeast ALS Clinical Trials Consortium (NEALS), the largest and most active consortium in the world dedicated to ALS. He directs the NEALS outcomes and clinical monitoring cores and is the principal investigator for two multicenter clinical trials, as well as a biomarker study measuring ALS disease progression.
Dr. Shefner received his PhD from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and his MD from Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. He completed his residency training at the Harvard Longwood Neurology Training Program in Boston and completed a fellowship in neuromuscular disease at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Prof Adriano Chiò
MD
Prof Adriano Chiò is a neurologist currently working in Torino, Italy. He is Professor of Neurology and Director of the ALS Center at the University of Torino and the Città della Salute e della Scienza Hospital, Torino, Italy. He is director of the ALS Expert Center in Torino, that aims for optimal diagnostic work-up, care and treatment for patients with ALS and other motor neuron diseases in Piedmont. He leads the Italian ALS Genetic (ITALSGEN) Consortium. Adriano Chiò, whose main areas of research are epidemiology, cognition, neuroimaging, and genetics of ALS, is best known for his research on risk of ALS in soccer players, the phenotypic heterogeneity of ALS and has contributed to the discovering of several ALS genes, including C9ORF72, VCP, MATR3 and KIF5A. He has published over 330 papers in peer-reviewed journals. He was awarded the 2015 Sheila Essay Award, presented by the American Academy of Neurology and ALS Association (USA).