Tarja Malm

A.I.Virtanen Institute, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland

Prof. Tarja Malm is Professor (tenure track) in Molecular Neurobiology and the head of the Neuroinflammation research group at the A.I.Virtanen Institute, University of Eastern Finland and the head of the “In vitro and ex vivo electrophysiology core facility” at the Biocenter Kuopio. She obtained her PhD in 2006 in Neurobiology with the focus on glial cell biology and carried out her postdoctoral training at the Case Western Reserve University, USA.

Her research focuses on understanding how and why microglia become malfunctional in different neurodegenerative diseases and to elucidate the functional impact of microglia-neuron interactions. Her group uses interdisciplinary approaches and develops novel, human based models to find therapeutic strategies to combat brain diseases. Her research group has pioneered development of methodologies to differentiate microglia and microglia containing cerebral organoids from human induced pluripotent stem cells.

Michael ​ Heneka

University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

Prof. Dr. Med Michael Heneka is a board-certified neurologist and clinician-scientist with more than 25 years of experience in studying neurodegenerative diseases at experimental, preclinical and clinical levels.

He has a long-standing interest in immunology and neuroscience. While the main focus of his work is related to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, Professor Heneka has also been researching amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease.

At the clinical level, he established a neurodegenerative outpatient unit at both the University of Münster and the University of Bonn, Germany. From 2016 to 2021, he led the department of Neurodegenerative Disease and Geriatric Psychiatry in Bonn.

Since January 2022, he is the Director of the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) at the University of Luxembourg and Principal Investigator in the Neuroinflammation group (Heneka Lab).

Soyon Hong

UK Dementia Research Institute at University College London, London, UK

Dr. Soyon Hong is a Group Leader at the UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) at University College London (UCL). She received her PhD in Neuroscience in 2012 from Harvard University, after having trained with Dr Dennis Selkoe, and completed her post-doctoral fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in 2018 in the lab of Dr Beth Stevens. While in this latter role, she conducted a study that was among the first to propose microglia as critical players in synaptic pathology in disease. In 2018, Dr Hong started her lab at the UK DRI, aiming to understand immune mechanisms of neural circuitry and function. Specifically, the lab studies how synapses are targeted in the adult brain for elimination. To that end, the lab recently discovered a role for perivascular cells in influencing microglia-synapse phagocytosis via SPP1/osteopontin in models of amyloidosis. The lab employs spatial and single-cell omics as well as functional studies in disease models to profile intercellular neuroimmune/neuroglial interactions and how they may confer region-specific synapse vulnerability in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.