Dr Jemeen Sreedharan studied medicine at King’s College London, intercalating a BSc in Neurosciences and developing an early interest in neurodegeneration. After general medical training in London and Cambridge he conducted doctoral studies at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London. Under the supervision of Prof Christopher Shaw, he identified mutations in TDP-43 as a cause of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or motor neuron disease, MND).

He then completed general neurology training in London before obtaining a Clinician Scientist Fellowship award from the MRC to allow him to develop novel TDP-43-based animal models of ALS. He spent the first two years of the Fellowship at the University of Massachusetts Medical School working in the laboratories of Prof Marc Freeman and Prof Robert H Brown Jr in the departments of Neurobiology and Neurology respectively. Using a unique mosaic approach to study aged adult motor neurons in fruit flies he identified three genetic suppressors of TDP-43 toxicity. In parallel he also generated a novel mouse model of ALS and frontotemporal dementia (FTD), which is designed to more closely mimic the human condition than existing models.

He returned to the UK in October 2014 to continue his work under the mentorship of Dr Michael Coleman. In June 2017, thanks to a van Geest Fellowship, he and his team made the move to the Maurice Wohl Clinical Neuroscience Research Institute at King’s College London to continue their work on models of ALS and FTD. In 2019 he received the Alzheimer’s Research UK David Hague Early Career Investigator Award. In 2020 he was awarded a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship.