Name John Hardy | Role Geneticist | |
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Born John Anthony Hardy
November 9, 1954 (age 69) ( 1954-11-09 ) Institutions St Mary's Hospital, London
Mayo Clinic
National Institute on Aging
University of South Florida
University College London Alma mater University of Leeds (BSc)
Imperial College London (PhD) Thesis The release of amino acids and phenylethylamine from mammalian synaptosomes (1981) Education University of Leeds, Imperial College London Awards Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Notable awards Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, Royal Society, Academy of Medical Sciences, United Kingdom | ||
John Anthony Hardy FRS (born 9 November 1954) is a human geneticist and molecular biologist at the Reta Lila Weston Institute of Neurological Studies at University College London with research interests in neurological diseases.
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Education
Hardy received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Leeds in 1976 and his PhD from Imperial College London in 1981 for research on dopamine and amino acid neuropharmacology.
Career and research
Following his PhD, Hardy did postdoctoral research at the MRC Neuropathogenesis Unit in Newcastle upon Tyne, England and then further postdoctoral work at the Swedish Brain Bank in Umeå, Sweden where he started to work on Alzheimer's disease.
He became Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at St. Mary's Hospital, Imperial College London in 1985 and initiated genetic studies of Alzheimer's disease there. He became Associate Professor in 1989 and then took the Pfeiffer Endowed Chair of Alzheimer's Research at the University of South Florida, in Tampa in 1992. In 1996 he moved to Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, as Consultant and Professor of Neuroscience.
He became Chair of Neuroscience in 2000 and moved to National Institute on Aging, Bethesda, Maryland, as Chief of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics in 2001. In 2007 he took up the Chair of Molecular Biology of Neurological Disease at the Reta Lila Weston Institute of Neurological Studies, University College London.
On 29 November 2015, he was awarded the Breakthrough Prize.
Awards and honours
Among other awards and honours, Hardy has won the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for dissecting the causes of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and frontotemporal dementia; the MetLife prize for research into Alzheimer's disease, and the Potamkin Prize for his work in describing the first genetic mutations in the amyloid gene in Alzheimer's disease, in 1991. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2009.