Miratul Muqit, MD, PhD

Miratul Muqit has made major contributions to understanding how two Parkinson’s disease-linked genes, PINK1 and Parkin, function together in removing damaged mitochondria by autophagy or ‘mitophagy’. The molecular mechanisms elucidated by his research group have contributed to the development of targeted therapies for mitophagy that entered clinical trials last year for Parkinson’s patients. He studied Medicine at the University of Edinburgh and was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University before completing a PhD at UCL. He is currently Director of the UK DRI Parkinson’s Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh and Professor of Experimental Neurology at the MRC Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit at the University of Dundee. He was elected an EMBO Young Investigator in 2017, Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2020, and Fellow of Academy Medical Sciences in 2023.