Sonia Gandhi

Sonia Gandhi is a British physician and neuroscientist who leads the Francis Crick Institute neurodegeneration laboratory. She moved to the University of Oxford to complete a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (BM BCh) degree in medicine.

Research and career She was awarded a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) lectureship at Imperial College London in 2009. Gandhi established her laboratory at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology in 2013. Her research group develop human-derived induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) models of disease, with a focus on understanding how the aggregation of alpha-synuclein, a protein encoded by the SNCA gene, impacts cell physiology. Gandhi and co-workers showed that clumps of alpha-synuclein can be toxic to neural function, damaging proteins on the surface of mitochondria. This damage forced a channel on mitochondria to open and made them less efficient in their production of energy, causing them to swell and leak essential chemicals – eventually causing the cell to die. In February 2020 Gandhi was awarded a Medical Research Council (MRC) clinical fellowship to study the fundamental origins of Parkinson's disease.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Gandhi studied the epidemiology of coronavirus disease. In particular, Gandhi was interested in how the virus evolved throughout the course of the pandemic, how it impacted the nervous system and how it was transmitted between people.

In 2026, she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Selected publications Gandhi's publications include: A common LRRK2 mutation in idiopathic Parkinson's disease

Mechanism of Oxidative Stress in Neurodegeneration

PINK1-Associated Parkinson's Disease Is Caused by Neuronal Vulnerability to Calcium-Induced Cell Death