The David Hague Early Career Investigator of the Year Award is presented to the most outstanding early career researcher in the field of biomedical dementia research. The prize is worth £25,000 in research expenses, with an additional £1,500 personal prize.
In 2021, the award was shared by Dr Sophie Bradley and Prof Renzo Mancuso. The winners presented their work at the 2021 Alzheimer’s Research UK Conference. Dr Sophie Bradley shared her work on a specific drug target for Alzheimer’s disease and Prof Renzo Mancuso highlighted his ground-breaking stem cell research.
Dr Sophie Bradley is an Associate Director in Translational Neuroscience at Sosei Heptares and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow. Her research is focused on exploiting the G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) superfamily as therapeutic targets in the central nervous system. Dr Bradley obtained her PhD in 2011 from the University of Leicester, and subsequently spent 4 years at the MRC Toxicology Unit. Dr Bradley relocated to Glasgow in 2016 to undertake a Lord Kelvin Adam Smith independent fellowship to establish her own laboratory, and was subsequently appointed to Senior Lecturer, leading a team focussed on investigating the role and therapeutic potential of GPCRs in neuroinflammation/neurodegeneration. In 2021, Dr Bradley joined Sosei Heptares, an international biopharmaceutical group focussed on GPCR drug discovery. Read more about her in this press release.
Prof Renzo Mancuso has a PhD in Neuroscience from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (laboratory of Prof. Xavier Navarro). He performed postdoctoral trainings in the laboratories of Prof. V. Hugh Perry (Southampton, UK), and Prof. Bart De Strooper at the VIB-KU Leuven. Prof Mancuso has contributed to elucidating the detrimental role of microglia in the aggregation of tau cell death, and the establishment of microglia humanized models for the study of genotype-phenotype interactions in neurodegenerative diseases. His laboratory at VIB-University of Antwerp aims to dissect the role of microglia and neuroinflammation in Alzheimer’s disease, using complex iPSC cellular and animal systems.
