The organiser
Rejko Krüger
Director of Transversal Translational Medicine‘ at the LIH, Professor and Consultant Neurologist at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) and the Centre Hospitalier de Luxembourg (CHL).
Professor Rejko Krüger is a Professor for Neuroscience at the University of Luxembourg. He is Head of the Clinical and Experimental Neuroscience research group at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine and his research on Parkinson’s disease is supported by an Excellence Grant of the Fonds National de la Recherche (FNR PEARL). He joined the UL in June 2014 after 9 years of being Associate Professor for Neurology at University Clinic Tübingen and Head of the Laboratory for Functional Neurogenomics, Hertie-Institute for Clinical Brain Research in Tübingen, Germany. He has extensive clinical experience with a focus on movement disorders, as well as research experience in the field of Parkinson’s disease. Prof. Krüger studied medicine at the Bochum Medical School (Germany) and Université Louis Pasteur Strasbourg (France) followed by a specialisation in neurology.
His clinical and research experience extends over nearly 20 years with a special interest focus in the genetics of Parkinson’s disease, which resulted in more than 120 scientific publications thus far (H Factor 42). Multiple clinical studies on Parkinson’s disease are led by Prof. Krüger. He coordinates the National Cohort Programme on Parkinson’s disease (HELP-PD) in Luxembourg within the National Center for Excellence in Research on Parkinson’s disease (NCER-PD), funded by the Fonds National de Recherche.
Furthermore, he sees patients with Movement Disorders within the Competence Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases at the Centre Hospitalier de Luxembourg and has established, together with Dr. Hertel, the deep brain stimulation centre (www.luxstim.lu) in Luxembourg. In 2017, the Ministry of Health has provided funding to Prof. Krüger to lead integrated healthcare concepts for neurodegenerative diseases in Luxembourg: ParkinsonNet (a care network of health care professionals for Parkinson’s disease) and the “Programme Demense Prevention” (an initiative to help prevent dementia). He is currently a reviewer for various high impact factor international journals and funding agencies.
Manu Sharma
Manu Sharma is a trained genetic epidemiologist and neuroscientist. His expertise integrates fields of neurogenetics, genetic epidemiology, statistical genetics, and bioinformatics to understand the genetic architecture of neurodegenerative diseases. Since 2013, he is leading the Centre for Genetic Epidemiology within the Institute for Clinical Epidemiology and Applied Biometry, University of Tubingen. He is the coordinator of the Luxembourg-German Indian Alliance on Neurodegenerative diseases and Therapeutics (Lux-GIANT). He is a firm believer in open science and the inclusion of population diversity in genomic research.