The Hidden World of Protein Aggregation

David B. Teplow, Ph.D., is a Professor of Neurology, Emeritus, at UCLA and an internationally recognized leader in efforts to understand and treat Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Teplow's group has used a multi-disciplinary approach to determine how neurotoxic peptides, such as the amyloid β-protein (Alzheimer's disease) and α-synuclein (Parkinson’s disease), form neurotoxic structures that kill neurons and to develop the means to block these processes. Dr. Teplow received undergraduate training at UC Berkeley; a Ph.D. from the University of Washington; and was a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech. Before coming to UCLA, Dr. Teplow was a faculty member in the Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School. Dr. Teplow has published >250 peer-reviewed articles, books and book chapters, and commentaries, in addition to serving on numerous national and international scientific advisory boards. Dr. Teplow was a founding editor of the Journal of Molecular Neuroscience and Current Chemical Biology, He is Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier serial Progress in Molecular Biology and Translational Science and is Associate Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Neurodegenerative Disease.

Prof. Vladimir N. Uversky, PhD, DSc, FRSB, FRSC, FAIMBE, Professor at the Department of Molecular Medicine, Morsani College of Medicine, University of South Florida (USF), is a pioneer in the field of protein intrinsic disorder. He has made a number of groundbreaking contributions in the field of protein folding, misfolding, and intrinsic disorder. He obtained his academic degrees from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (Ph.D., in 1991) and from the Institute of Experimental and Theoretical Biophysics, Russian Academy of Sciences (D.Sc., in 1998). He spent his early career working mostly on protein folding at the Institute of Protein Research and the Institute for Biological Instrumentation (Russia). In 1998, moved to the University of California Santa Cruz. In 2004, joined the Indiana University−Purdue University Indianapolis as a Senior Research Professor. Since 2010, Professor Uversky is with USF, where he works on various aspects of protein intrinsic disorder phenomenon and on analysis of protein folding and misfolding processes. Prof. Uversky has authored over 1250 scientific publications and edited several books and book series on protein structure, function, folding, misfolding, and intrinsic disorder. He is also serving as an editor in a number of scientific journals. He was a co-founder of the Intrinsically Disordered Proteins Subgroup at the Biophysical Society and the Intrinsically Disordered Proteins Gordon Research Conference. Prof. Uversky collaborated with more than 12,500 colleagues from more than 2,750 research organizations in 89 countries/territories.