Mitochondrial Neuropathies

Nigel Calcutt, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Pathology at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Calcutt was spawned and bred in the Black Country of England and took both his B.Sc. in Zoology and Ph.D. Physiology and Pharmacology at Nottingham University, England. Following post-doctoral research at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London and at the University of California San Diego, he was appointed to the faculty of the Department of Pathology at UCSD in 1993. Dr. Calcutt first began studying nerve damage caused by diabetes as an undergraduate, with a largely unsuccessful, but nevertheless entertaining, attempt to generate diabetic chickens. Undeterred by the paucity of pre-diabetic poultry, he has continued to investigate mechanisms of diabetic neuropathy and neuropathic pain throughout his career, with a particular interest in developing therapies than can be translated to clinical use. He is also a co-founder of the biotechnology company WinSanTor Inc. and the non-profit organization Diabetes Research Connection.

Paul Fernyhough performed his B.Sc. degree in Biological Sciences at the University of Essex and PhD in biochemistry in the Department of Biochemistry at University of Sheffield in the UK. He also performed postdoctoral research at Colorado State University, Kings College London and as a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellow at St Bartholomew’s Medical College. Dr. Fernyhough worked for 51⁄2 years (1998-2004) as a tenured lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences (now the Faculty of Life Sciences) at the University of Manchester. In 2004 Dr. Fernyhough set up a neuroscience research group at St Boniface Hospital Research Centre in Winnipeg, Canada with strong links with the Department of Pharmacology & Therapeutics at the University of Manitoba. Dr. Fernyhough’s general research interest is in the cell biology underlying neurodegenerative disorders of the peripheral and central nervous systems with a focus on the impact of diabetes.