Professor Simon Mead

Professor Simon Mead is a consultant neurologist and clinical lead of the UK’s National Prion Clinic based at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, UCLH. Simon trained at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, Newcastle and London. His PhD (2002) focussed on prion diseases, since then he has retained this interest working at the Medical Research Council’s Prion Unit at UCL where he is Deputy Director. Prions are proteinaceous infectious agents that cause fatal neurodegenerative disorders like Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) and animal diseases like bovine spongiform encephalopathy and chronic wasting disease of cervids. Prion diseases share mechanisms and aetiologies with common dementias. Simon is interested in all aspects of CJD and other human prion diseases, particularly experimental medicine, the discovery of genetic and epigenetic factors that cause or modify prion disease, understanding prion-like mechanisms in other dementia disorders and the development of treatments for prion disease.