Dr. Sandra Pritzkow is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. She completed her PhD in 2011 at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, Germany. Between 2012–2016 she was a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Claudio Soto’s lab at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. In 2017, she was promoted to Assistant Professor and started to develop her research group. Dr. Pritzkow's main interest is translational research on neurodegenerative diseases associated with the misfolding and aggregation of proteins, mostly working in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Prion diseases. Currently, Dr. Pritzkow is leading a project to validate the use of PMCA for the detection of prions in the blood of humans infected with variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease prions. Furthermore, she is participating in research to expand the principles of PMCA to detect misfolded aggregated proteins implicated in some of the most prevalent neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
Dr. Claudio Soto is the Huffington Distinguished University Chair, a neurology professor, and Director of the George and Cynthia Mitchell Center for Alzheimer's Disease and Related Brain Disorders at The University of Texas Medical School in Houston. He is also the Founder, and Chief Scientific Officer of AMPRION Inc. He earned his PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Chile in 1993 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Catholic University of Chile and the New York University School of Medicine. Later, he became an Assistant Professor in 1995 at NYU. Between 1999 and 2003, Dr. Soto held several positions at Serono International in Geneva, Switzerland, including Senior Scientist, Chairman of the Department of Molecular Neurobiology, and Senior Executive Scientific Advisor for Neurobiology. Between 2003 and 2008, he was Director of the George and Cynthia Mitchell Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases and Professor of the Departments of Neurology, Neuroscience & Cell Biology, and Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Dr. Soto has received numerous awards and has been invited to speak at over 250 international scientific meetings worldwide. He has also been awarded many grants from NIH and private foundations for a total funding of over 60 million dollars. He has published more than 230 peer review articles, which have been cited >33,000 times (h-index = 91)
