Christopher Shaw trained as a Neurologist in New Zealand before coming to the UK on a Wellcome Trust Fellowship and moving to King’s College London, where he is Director of the Maurice Wohl Clinical Neuroscience Institute.

His research team have discovered several amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) genes, enabling gene testing for patients and at-risk family members. They have generated stem cell and transgenic mouse models that recapitulate key features of the human disease, which have revealed important mechanistic insights. Their focus for the future is to develop gene therapies for a wide range of neurodegenerative disorders using adeno-associated viral gene vectors.