Michel Goedert

Michel Goedert is a neuroscientist and former Head of Neurobiology, at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

Goedert was born and raised in Luxembourg. After finishing his medical studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland in 1981, he obtained a PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK in 1984, before he started working at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where is currently a Programme Leader. He is also an Emeritus Honorary Professor at the University of Cambridge. He studies the filamentous amyloid inclusions that define most human neurodegenerative diseases.

Goedert served on a number of national and international Committees. He was a member of the Board of Governors of the University of Luxembourg from 2004 to 2023. His time there is described in the semi-autobiographical memoir entitled BEGINNINGS (Point Nemo Publishing 2025).

Goedert was awarded the Metlife Foundation Award for Medical Research in Alzheimer's Disease in 1996, the Potamkin Prize in 1998 and the European Grand Prix for Research by the Foundation for Research on Alzheimer's disease in 2014. In 2018 he was one of four recipients of the Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Prize with the citation "For their groundbreaking research on the genetic and molecular basis of Alzheimer's disease, with far-reaching implications for the development of new therapeutic interventions as well as for the understanding of other neurodegenerative diseases of the brain". In 2019 he received the Royal Medal. and in 2020 the Rainwater Charitable Foundation Prize for outstanding innovation in neurodegenerative disorder research. He was awarded the Hartwig Piepenbrock-DZNE Prize in 2021, an Annemarie Opprecht Foundation Parkinson Award (with S. Scheres) in 2023, the Karl Golser Award in 2024 and the Helis Foundation Award for Parkinson's Disease and Neurodegenerative Research in 2026. Goedert is a member of EMBO, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and an Honorary Member of the Institut Grand-Ducal, Luxembourg.

His partner is Professor Maria Grazia Spillantini, a neuroscientist, with whom he has a son, Thomas.

Research Goedert's work combines biochemical, molecular biological and structural techniques to investigate common neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. His research focuses on the abnormal filamentous inclusions that characterise Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, showing that the intracellular filaments of these diseases are made of either tau protein or alpha-synuclein Goedert and colleagues also identified mutations in MAPT, the tau gene, that cause inherited forms of frontotemporal dementia with tau inclusions, establishing a central role for tau assembly in the disease. They provided the first experimental demonstration of the prion-like properties of filamentous tau. Since 2017, Goedert has collaborated with Sjors Scheres in determining the cryo-EM structures of amyloid filaments from human brain.

Works