Professor Hilal A. 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. After obtaining his doctoral degree, he joined the Picower Institute for Medical Research in Long Island New York. 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 and was later promoted to an instructor in neurology at Harvard Medical School. In 2005 Prof. Lashuel moved Switzerland to join the Brain Mind Institute at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL) where he is now an Associate Professor of Neuroscience at the Brain Mind Institute and the director of the Laboratory of Molecular and Chemical Biology of Neurodegeneration.

Research in the Lashuel laboratory 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 research is to develop novel mechanism-based therapies and diagnostics for early intervention and monitoring disease progression. His work is funded by Swiss, European, US funding agencies, private foundations (Michael J Fox Foundation, CHDI), and partnerships with Swiss and international biotech and pharmaceutical companies.

In addition to his appointment at the EPFL, he spent a year as visiting professor at the Department of Neurological Sciences at Stanford University. He also 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 is the founder and CSO of ND BioSciences SA, a biotech company focusing on developing novel diagnostics and therapies to treat neurodegenerative diseases.

Prof. Lashuel’s scientific contribution to this field includes i) 200 publications in peer-reviewed journals ii) four patents on novel strategies for preventing protein aggregation and treating autoimmune and inflammatory diseases; iii) more than 250 invited lectures and > 22000 citations (h-Index =81) since 1996. Prof. Lashuel is the recipient of several awards and honors, including the Takreem Foundation: Scientific & Technological Achievement Award, Kuwait Prize in Fundamental Sciences (Biological Sciences), and ERC starting and proof of concept grant. In 2012 he was named Young Global Leader (YGL) by the World Economic Forum. He was featured by the Swiss business magazine L‘Hebdo among the 2009 “100 outstanding personalities” in the French-speaking part of Switzerland” (Forum des 100).