Einar M. Sigurdsson PhD

Einar M. Sigurdsson, Ph.D. is a Professor of Neuroscience and Physiology, and Psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine. A native of Iceland, he received a master’s degree in Pharmacy (Cand. Pharm.) from the University of Iceland, and a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from Loyola University Chicago Medical Center. He subsequently obtained postdoctoral training at New York University School of Medicine in the laboratory of Blas Frangione.
His honors include a Zenith Fellows Award and the Margaret M. Cahn Research Award from the Alzheimer´s Association, the Irma T. Hirschl Career Scientist Award, and several NIH grant awards as principal investigator. He has been continuously funded by the NIH since his first faculty appointment in 2001. His services include having been a standing member of an NIH study section and serving on numerous other review panels at NIH and for various foundations. His editorial activities include editing Amyloid Proteins: Methods and Protocols, with the 3rd edition recently published, and serving as Specialty Chief Editor of Frontiers in Neurodegeneration.
His current research focuses on pathogenesis, therapy and diagnosis for age-related protein conformational disorders, in particular Alzheimer’s disease, and most recently includes exploratory studies in Parkinson’s disease and related synucleinopathies. Dr. Sigurdsson and his collaborators pioneered the use of modified amyloid-β derivatives as potential immunotherapy for Alzheimer’s disease.
Furthermore, they showed for the first time that active and passive immunization as well as chelators delayed the onset of prion disease in mice. On the diagnostic front, Dr. Sigurdsson and colleagues published the initial report on detection of amyloid plaques in living mouse brains by magnetic resonance imaging. Lately, he has pioneered the approach to harness the immune system to target pathological tau protein in Alzheimer’s disease and other tauopathies.