Sarah J. Tabrizi BSc, MBChB, FRCP, PhD

Sarah Tabrizi graduated with First class honors in biochemistry, then medicine from the University of Edinburgh in 1992 where she graduated with the Gold Medal for top student. She has worked on research into neurodegenerative diseases since her Ph.D. as an MRC clinical training fellow at UCL. After clinical training, she obtained a DH National Clinician Scientist Fellowship in 2002 to work on protein misfolding at UCL. She was promoted to Senior Lecturer and Hon. Consultant Neurologist in 2003, and Full Professor in 2009. In 2016, she founded the UCL Huntington’s Disease Centre where she is currently the Director. In addition to basic bench science which focuses on basic cellular mechanisms of neurodegeneration focusing on Huntington’s disease (HD), she also leads a large translational research program in HD that is working towards finding effective disease-modifying treatments.

She was the PI of TRACK-HD and Track-On HD, both major international research initiatives aimed at understanding the neurobiology of the neurodegenerative changes in premanifest and early-stage HD gene carriers. She was the global clinical PI on the world’s first huntingtin lowering (or “gene silencing”) clinical trial for HD using antisense oligonucleotide therapy, sponsored by Ionis pharmaceuticals which started in 2015 and completed in 2017. She has published over 300 peer-reviewed publications to date, and her research work has been the subject of articles in NEJM, The Economist, Nature Outlook, Scientific American, and The Lancet.

She serves on several panels including the UK HD association, the European HD Network, and NINDS/NIH. She co-founded, with Sir Michael Rawlins, the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group for HD in 2010. In 2014, she was elected a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences. In 2017 she received the seventh Leslie Gehry Brenner Prize for Innovation in Science awarded by the Hereditary Disease Foundation. In 2018 and was appointed as a Principal Investigator at the UK Dementia Research Institute Hub, and was invited to act as Global Academic Lead for the Critical Path Institute’s Huntington’s Disease Regulatory Science Consortium (HD-RSC).