Sonia Gandhi

Sonia Gandhi is an MRC Senior Clinician Scientist and Professor of Neurology, a Senior Group Leader of the Neurodegeneration Biology Laboratory, and an Assistant Research Director at The Francis Crick Institute. 

Sonia obtained an MA in Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, a degree in Medicine at the University of Oxford, and a PhD in Neuroscience at UCL, through a Wellcome Clinical Research Training Fellowship. She was awarded an NIHR Lectureship in Neurology at Imperial College London in 2009, and a Wellcome Trust Intermediate Fellowship in 2014, to establish her laboratory at UCL QS Institute of Neurology, seconding to the Francis Crick Institute as a Group Leader in 2017. In 2020 she was awarded an MRC Senior Clinician Scientist Fellowship.

At the Crick, her research seeks to understand the molecular mechanisms drive neurodegenerative diseases, specifically Parkinson’s disease. The laboratory adopts an interdisciplinary approach combining physical chemistry, stem cell biology, single cell, spatial and computational neuroscience to study the earliest stages of protein misfolding in human systems, and the functional consequences of aggregation.

A major focus of the laboratory is to build human models of the brain in vitro from patient derived induced pluripotent stem cells - discoveries in these models have advanced target identification, drug development for disease modifying therapies, and predictive approaches for personalised medicine. As a clinician scientist, Sonia leads a clinical research centre for Parkinson’s to accelerate the translation from scientific discovery to improvements in clinical care.