Rate My Professor Mina Ryten

Professor Mina Ryten is a clinician scientist and Van Geest Professor at the University of Cambridge, serving as Director of the UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) at Cambridge and leader of the Ryten Lab since January 2024. She began her medical training at the University of Cambridge before completing an MBPhD at University College London (UCL), with her PhD focusing on purinergic signalling in skeletal muscle development. She conducted postdoctoral training at UCL via an MRC Post-doctoral Fellowship in Systems Biology, trained as a clinical geneticist, and led research groups at the UCL Institute of Neurology and UCL Institute of Child Health from 2017. In May 2025, she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) for her contributions to medical science, including advancing understanding of neurological diseases. Ryten also holds positions as Bye-Fellow and Director of Studies in Clinical Medicine at Gonville & Caius College.

Ryten's research employs human brain transcriptomic data to uncover the genetic basis of neurodegenerative diseases, with a particular emphasis on Lewy body disorders such as Parkinson's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. Her work maps disease risk variants to genes in complex disorders, identifies gene-gene interactions in rare neurogenetic conditions, and examines RNA processing disruptions like splicing and A-to-I editing in neurodegeneration. She develops RNA-targeting therapies for rare diseases and utilizes techniques including single-nucleus, spatial transcriptomics, and bioinformatics. Notable publications include 'A hexanucleotide repeat expansion in C9ORF72 is the cause of chromosome 9p21-linked ALS-FTD' (Neuron, 2011), 'Identification of novel risk loci, causal insights, and heritable risk for Parkinson's disease: a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies' (The Lancet Neurology, 2019), 'Analysis of shared heritability in common disorders of the brain' (Science, 2018), and 'Common genetic variants influence human subcortical brain structures' (Nature, 2015). Her efforts have significantly influenced neurogenetics and the translation of genomic insights into potential therapies.