Prof. Hilal Lashuel is the Research Development and Innovation Advisor to the Chairperson of Qatar Foundation and Executive Director of RDI at the Chairperson’s Office. He is also the director of the Laboratory of Chemical Biology of Neurodegeneration and Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of ND BioSciences SA.
Professor Lashuel received his B.Sc. degree in Chemistry from the City University of New York in 1994 and completed his doctoral studies at Texas A&M University and the Scripps Research Institute in 2000. Following his doctorate, he joined the Picower Institute for Medical Research in Long Island, New York, as a research scientist. In 2001, he moved to Harvard Medical School and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital as a research fellow in the Center for Neurologic Diseases, later being promoted to an instructor in Neurology at Harvard Medical School. In 2005, Prof. Lashuel transitioned to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL) where he currently serves as the Director of the Laboratory of Molecular and Chemical Biology of Neurodegeneration. His research focuses on applying chemical biology approaches to elucidate the mechanisms of protein misfolding and aggregation and their contribution to neurodegenerative diseases. The ultimate goal of his work is to develop novel mechanism-based therapies and diagnostics for early intervention and monitoring disease progression.
In addition to his role at EPFL, Prof. Lashuel was a visiting professor at the Department of Neurological Sciences at Stanford University. He served as the Executive Director of Qatar Biomedical Research and a member of the Board of Trustees for the Qatar Biobank and Qatar Genome Project from 2014-2016. He was also Vice Chair of the International Scientific Advisory Committee of Qatar Biobank from 2016-2019. His extensive service includes leadership roles in the Qatar Metabolic Institute Research Group, the Qatar Cancer Research Partnership, and numerous national and international boards and committees, including the Joint Qatar Foundation-Weill Cornell Medicine Qatar Advisory Board, the Path Towards Personalized Medicine (PTPM) Steering Committee of the Qatar National Research Fund, and the Brain Forum Scientific Advisory Board.
Prof. Lashuel's scientific contributions include: 1) 226 publications in peer-reviewed journals; 2) Nine patents on novel strategies for detecting and preventing protein aggregation, treating autoimmune and inflammatory diseases; 3) Over 250 invited lectures; and 3) More than 30,000 citations with an h-index of 93. Over the past two decades, his work has been funded by Swiss, European, and US funding agencies, private foundations such as the Michael J. Fox Foundation and CHDI, and partnerships with biotech and pharmaceutical companies including Abbvie, Merck, Nestle, AC Immune, Idorsia, and UCB.He has received numerous awards and honors, including the Takreem Foundation's Scientific & Technological Achievement Award, the Kuwait Prize in Fundamental Sciences (Biological Sciences), the H. Martin Friedman Distinguished Lecture at Brooklyn College (CUNY), the EPFL-Section of Life Sciences and Technologies Ambition Award, ERC starting and proof of concept grants, and the Human Frontiers Science Young Investigator Award. In 2012, he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and was featured by the Swiss business magazine L'Hebdo among the "100 outstanding personalities” in the French-speaking part of Switzerland (Forum des 100).
Publications: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=lashuel&sort=date
Lashuel Lab website: https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lashuel-lab/publications/
Pubmed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=lashuel&sort=date
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=tDdAP4EAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao