Rate My Professor Ammar Al-Chalabi

Professor Ammar Al-Chalabi is Professor of Neurology and Complex Disease Genetics at King’s College London. He serves as Director of the King’s Motor Neuron Disease Care and Research Centre and as a consultant neurologist at King’s College Hospital. His research focuses on the causes, modifiers, and potential treatments for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as motor neuron disease. He is co-Director of the UK MND Research Institute, Programme Chair of the International Symposium on ALS/MND, and a National Institute for Health Research Senior Investigator. He co-leads the Project MinE international whole genome sequencing initiative in ALS and the MND Register of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Al-Chalabi completed his medical degree at Leicester University and earned his PhD at King’s College London. He trained in Leicester and London before becoming a consultant neurologist. His contributions have been recognized with the Forbes Norris Award from the International Alliance of ALS/MND Associations, the Healey Center International Prize for Innovation in ALS, the Sheila Essey Award from the American Academy of Neurology, and election as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He holds the distinctions of FRCP and FMedSci. He is a Visiting Fellow at the Perron Institute for Neurological and Translational Science and Lisa S Krivickas Visiting Professor at Massachusetts General Hospital. Key publications include studies on chromosome 9p21 in sporadic ALS (Lancet Neurology, 2010), genome-wide association analyses identifying new risk variants in ALS (Nature Genetics, 2016), analysis of ALS as a multistep process (Lancet Neurology, 2014), and research on riluzole treatment stages (Lancet Neurology, 2018) and SOD1-mediated ALS phenotypes (Nature Communications, 2022).