Alzheimer’s research award for Professor Martin Rossor

Professor Martin Rossor of the UCL Institute of Neurology, has received the 2009 Bengt Winblad Lifetime Achievement Award from the Alzheimer's Association for his contribution to Alzheimer's disease research. Rossor is Head of the Division of Clinical Neurology at the UCL Institute of Neurology. His early research into Alzheimer's disease was undertaken in Cambridge with Lesley Iversen in the early 1980s as a doctoral thesis. This comprised post-mortem neurochemical analyses of brains of patients dying with Alzheimer's disease and helped to define the selectivity of the deficit in the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. On moving to London he teamed up with Professor John Hardy, also of the UCL Institute of Neurology, to study familial Alzheimer's disease. He then established pre-symptomatic cohorts of at-risk individuals to map the earliest stages of the disease process, using novel methods that mapped precisely the location and rates of tissue loss. In recent times this has been extended to other neurodegenerative dementias.