Anna Elizabeth Rhoades, PhD, studies the proteins alpha-synuclein and tau that clump in the brain which place these at the center of Parkinson's disease (PD) and Alzheimer's disease pathology. Dr. Rhoades is educated in biophysics. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, Dr. Rhoades developed novel experimental methods for studying proteins. Later, as a postdoctoral trainee at Cornell University, New York, she applied these methods to the study of alpha-synuclein. Since establishing her independent research group, she has been studying the functions of alpha-synuclein and tau in health and disease using disease-linked forms of these proteins to assess the effects of dysfunction of these proteins.