Dr. Gabor G. Kovacs is Associate Professor at the Medical University of Vienna, Vienna Austria. After receiving his MD degree his work has been devoted to neurology and neuropathology, i.e. the study of tissue alterations in diseases of the nervous system for diagnostic and research purposes. In addition to qualification in clinical neurology (1998) and neuropathology (2003), he received his PhD for Neuroscience in 2002. He has been involved in the surveillance of human prion disease for more than 20 years and currently leads a research team on neurodegenerative diseases. His achievements include first descriptions, characterization and pathogenic elucidation of several peculiar types of neurological diseases, like frontotemporal dementia with globular glial inclusions or another one affecting elderly individuals; biomarker research; comparative studies of brain ageing and brain development; and pathogenesis studies on prion diseases. He has more than 220 published papers and several book chapters (including the editing of a book on neurodegenerative diseases), covering a wide range of topics from clinical neurology to neuropathology and molecular neuroscience. He serves in the editorial board of several journals. Affiliations and expertise: Institute of Neurology, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria Expertise: Neurology and Neuropathology
Dr. Irina Alafuzoff is currently professor in neuropathology at the Uppsala University, Institution in Immunology Genetics and Pathology, senior consultant at Uppsala University Hospital, Department of pathology, Uppsala, Sweden. She is a licensed physician since 1987, licensed pathologist since 1991 and she gained her title as Doctor in Medical Sciences in 1986. She has been professor in neuropathology since 2007 first at Kuopio University, Finland and since 2009 at Uppsala University, Sweden. During 7 years (2010-2016) she was the clinical director of the Department of Pathology at Uppsala University Hospital. She is member of the Brain Net Europe consortium funded by European Union during 8 years (2001-2008), headed by the professor Hans Kretzschmar. The objective of BNE consortium was to facilitate the use of human brain tissue in research and standardize/harmonize the diagnostics of neurodegenerative diseases. She has more than 220 published papers and several book chapters. Her primary interest has been and is research in human brain diseases and lately the emphasis has been research on human brains of cognitively unimpaired aged individuals. She and her team of researchers in Kuopio and Uppsala were one of the first to report that neurodegenerative alterations are more common that even expected in the aging brain. She and her coworkers have also looked at the association of various brain lesions with a number of systemic disorders and genetic risk factors. She has also been active in the education of medical students, residents and fellows and currently she is the president of the Swedish Society of Pathology.
