Consultant Neurologist and Clinical Lead of the NHS National Prion Clinic
Professor of Neurology and Deputy Director of the MRC Prion Unit at UCL
UK CJD Support Network Committee Member

After medical training at Cambridge and Oxford Universities and a PhD in the genetics of prion diseases at Imperial College London, Simon Mead is a Professor of Neurology and Clinical Lead of the UK National Prion Clinic based at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.

Also working at the UK Medical Research Council’s Prion Unit, his research interests include clinical studies of CJD or prion disease patients, the discovery of genetic factors that cause or influence prion disease and the development of treatments for prion disease based on antibodies.

National CJD Surveillance Unit, Edinburgh
Chair of the CJD Support Network Committee

Professor Richard Knight received his BA degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University in 1972, his medical degree in 1977, his postgraduate medical qualification in 1980 and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1993.

Professor Knight is presently serving as Director of the UK National CJD Surveillance Unit and has a Personal Chair in Clinical Neurology at the University of Edinburgh with an Honorary Consultant Clinical Neurology post in the Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Western General Hospital, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Professor Knight spends approximately 50% of his time divided between CJD Surveillance and research and 50% devoted to clinical services and teaching. He has authored and co-authored many CJD related papers related to sporadic, variant, genetic and iatrogenic forms of the illness.

Professor Knight also has a long involvement with CJD lay and charity organisations, currently being Chair of the UK National CJD Support Network Management Committee and an invited Friend and Advisory to the CJD International Support Alliance.

Director, Australian National CJD Registry (ANCJDR)
Medical Director, CJDSGN

Steven Collins is a neurologist-scientist who is Director of the Australian National Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Registry (ANCJDR), as well as Professor/Senior Principal Research Fellow in the Department of Medicine, the University of Melbourne and Clinical Lead, Dementia Mission and Member, Clinical Governance Committee, The Florey. He was a National Health & Medical Research Council Practitioner Fellow 2006-2020. Professor Collins is also appointed to the Department of Clinical Neurosciences and Neurological Research, St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne, where he heads the Mitochondrial & Autoimmune Neurological Disorders diagnostic laboratory, a NATA accredited, national referral service.

The ANCJDR is the national referral service for diagnostic testing of prion diseases and in 2014 this and Alzheimer Disease CSF biomarker testing were subsumed under the NATA accredited National Dementia Diagnostics Laboratory, of which Professor Collins is Director. Through the ANCJDR Professor Collins undertakes both epidemiological and basic scientific research into prion diseases involving supervision of post-doctoral fellows and PhD students.

In 2008 Professor Collins became a member of the Friends and Advisory group of the CJD International Support Alliance and in 2009 he took on the role as Medical Director of the CJD Support Group Network assisting the network to support CJD families in Australia.

In addition, Professor Collins undertakes translational research into Alzheimer’s disease, as well as participates as principal investigator in Alzheimer’s disease clinical trials. In 2023, Professor Collins was awarded an AO in the Australia Day King’s Honours for his contributions to the field of prion diseases.

Florey Institute and the University of Melbourne
Director, Australian National CJD Registry (ANCJDR)

Colin Masters is a Professor of Dementia Research at The Florey, University of Melbourne and a consultant at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. Colin Masters has focused his career on research in Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases, including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Over the last 40 years, his work is widely acknowledged as having had a major influence on Alzheimer’s disease research worldwide, particularly the collaborative studies conducted with Konrad Beyreuther in which they discovered the proteolytic neuronal origin of the A? amyloid protein, which causes Alzheimer’s disease. This work has led to the continued development of diagnostics and therapeutic strategies and has been recognised by the receipt of many international awards.

More recently, he has focused on describing the natural history of Alzheimer’s disease as a necessary preparatory step for disease-modifying therapies.

Pat is the co-founder and Head of Discovery Science at Gate Bio. Pat obtained his PhD in synthetic chemistry from the ANU under the supervision of Prof. Martin Banwell before conducting postdoctoral research in medicinal chemistry and chemical biology with Dr Chris Burns at the Walter and Elisa Hall Institute of medical research, and at the University of California, San Francisco with Prof. Jack Taunton, where he made pioneering discoveries on the selectivity of Sec61 modulators.

In 2017 Pat was recruited to Merck, South San Francisco as a Senior Scientist working on the development of cardiometabolic and oncology drugs. In 2021, Pat co-founded Gate Bio in South San Francisco, the first company dedicated to the discovery and development of Molecular Gates.