Professor Lars Matthias Ittner, Director, Dementia Research Centre, NHMRC Principal Research Fellow, Macquarie University.
Lars is the Director of the Dementia Research Centre and Professor for Neuroscience in the Faculty of Medicine at Macquarie University. Lars graduated in Medicine from the University of Ulm in Germany and received his M.D. from the University of Zurich in Switzerland in 2002. This was followed by postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Zurich, where he studied neuronal stem cells and signalling pathways, and after moving to Australia in 2005, at the University of Sydney, focusing on basic pathomechanisms underlying neurodegenerative diseases. He held faculty appointments at the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales before joining Macquarie University in 2018 to build the Dementia Research Centre. Lars was a German Research Foundation Fellow and is a current NHMRC Principal Research Fellow. He has published over 140 papers with over 12,000 citations, including in leading scientific journals, such as Science, Cell and Neuron. He received the ASBMB Merck Research Medal 2017 for his paradigm-shifting work in Alzheimer’s disease. He was awarded over $40 million in competitive grant funding. He is chief investigator on the NHMRC Program Grant ForeFront and led consecutive NHMRC (7x) and ARC (7x) projects since 2007.