$425,000 awarded to Veronique Belzil, under supervision of Dr. Leonard Petrucelli at Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, Florida.
Dr. Belzil began her research career as a PhD student at the Université de Montréal under the guidance of world renowned geneticist and Director of the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, Dr. Guy Rouleau. During this time, Dr. Belzil pursued a better understanding of the genetics behind familial/hereditary ALS and led or contributed to more than 20 manuscripts, an amazing accomplishment for a graduate student.
For the past four years, Dr. Belzil has spent her postdoctoral studies pursuing the complex understanding of how alterations in genetic regulation may lead to ALS not just in certain familial forms, but in sporadic ALS that makes up 90-95% of cases. She has led or contributed to a large number of important discoveries.
The high impact work that Dr. Belzil has been pursuing during her postdoctoral training translates very well into an expanded program for an independent laboratory and she aims to continue to tackle these mechanisms as an Assistant Professor. The program she has outlined is also designed to apply the knowledge of these discoveries into a strategy to develop novel and exciting new treatments for ALS that would be based on an intricate understanding of the disease.
Dr. Petrucelli and a mentoring committee at Mayo Clinic are committed to assisting Dr. Belzil to not only reach her goal of becoming an independent investigator at a Canadian institution, but to become an internationally recognized leader in translational ALS research.