Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Neurology

Dr. Steve Finkbeiner is Director of the Center for Systems and Therapeutics and Taube/Koret Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research at Gladstone Institutes, and is a Professor of Neurology and Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Wheaton College (1986), and concurrently earned an MD and a PhD in neuroscience from Yale University (1991). He completed an internship in internal medicine (1992) and chief residency (1995) in neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, followed by a research fellowship at Harvard Medical School (1998). Work in his academic research laboratory has focused on studying the molecular mechanisms that are responsible for learning, memory and neurodegeneration. A major focus of his work in the area of neurodegenerative disease has been the role of protein dyshomeostasis in HD, PD, ALS, and FTD. In this context, he has developed a robotic microscopy, a unique fully automated high throughput single cell analysis platform that provides very sensitive measures of phenotypes. This technology has been used to discover disease-related phenotypes in differentiated neurons from patients with neurodegenerative diseases to better understand mechanisms of disease, and to find and develop therapeutic strategies.