Leslie M. Thompson

Dr. Thompson is a Donald Bren and Chancellor’s Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California Irvine. She has studied Huntington’s disease (HD) for most of her scientifi career and was a member of the international consortium that identified the causative gene for HD in 1993. Since that time, the Thompson laboratory has been actively engaged in investigating the fundamental molecular and cellular events that underlie how the mutant HD gene causes degeneration of specific brain cell populations to induce motor and cognitive decline and premature death of patients with the ultimate goal to develop new treatments, including stem-cell based treatments. Dr. Thompson is the recipient of several awards including the HDF Lesley Gehry Brenner Award for Scientific Innovation in 2013, an NIH Research Program R35 Award and was elected an AAAS fellow in 2013.