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John Hardy, PH.D.

Chair, Molecular Biology of Neurological Disease, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, England

John Hardy received his degree in Biochemistry from Leeds in 1976 and his Ph.D. from Imperial College in Neuropharmacology in 1979. He did postdocs at the MRC Neuropathogenesis Unit and the Swedish Brain Bank, in Umea, where he started to work on Alzheimer’s disease. In 1985 he took the job of Lecturer in Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at St Mary’s Hospital, Imperial College, where he began working on the genetics of Alzheimer’s disease. In 1991 he led the group which found the first mutation in the amyloid gene which caused Alzheimer’s disease. This finding led him and others to formulate the amyloid hypothesis for the disease. In 1992 he moved to the United States, to the University of South Florida. In 1996 he moved to the Mayo Clinic where he became Chair of the Department of Neuroscience in 2000. In 1998 he was part of the consortium which identified mutations in the tau gene in Pick’s disease. In 2001 he moved to the NIH to become the Chief of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics, where he was part of the group which found triplications in the synuclein gene caused Parkinson’s disease. He returned to the Department of Molecular Neuroscience at the Institute of Neurology in 2007.

Dr. Hardy has won the Allied Signal, Potamkin, MetLife and Kaul Prizes, for his work on Alzheimer’s disease and the Anna Marie Opprecht Prize for his work on Parkinson’s disease. More recently he was awarded the 2011 Khalid Iqbal Lifetime Achievement Award in Alzheimer’s Disease Research and the IFRAD 2011 European Grand Prize for Alzheimer’s Research. In 2014 he was awarded The Dan David Prize endowed by the Dan David Foundation, headquartered at Tel Aviv University; the Thudichum Medal from the Biochemical Society and is the recipient of the 3rd Lord Brain Memorial Medal. Then he was awarded the Robert A. Pritzker Prize by the Michael J Fox Foundation. He has been elected a member of the Academy of Medical Sciences and has been awarded an honorary MD by the University of Umea, Sweden. He was made an FRS by the Royal Society in 2009 and in 2010 was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree by the University of Newcastle. During 2015 he was awarded the Piepenbrock-DZNE Award, and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences followed in 2016 by the Helis Prize.

He has three adult children and three grandchildren who live in the US.

Related Research:

Investigating the Serial Pathologies Related to Plasma Biomarkers in NLFTaum/h Mice: A New Mouse Model Featuring Neurofibrillary Tangles as a Result of Rising Amyloid Beta without Microtubule-Associated Protein Tau (MAPT) Mutations Frances Edwards John Hardy 2024-12-16 Using Long-Read Sequencing to Investigate the MAPT Locus and Transcripts in Neurodegeneration John Hardy 2023-01-06 Influence of Plaque Vicinity on Microglial and Astrocyte Gene Expression; Role of Human Tau and TREM2 Frances Edwards John Hardy 2022-02-11 Gene Expression Throughout Development of Pathology in APPKI Mice; Effects of Human Tau and Aging Frances Edwards John Hardy 2018-08-09

Funded Research

These projects were made possible from Cure Alzheimer's Fund support.

Project Description Researchers Funding
Investigating the Serial Pathologies Related to Plasma Biomarkers in NLFTaum/h Mice: A New Mouse Model Featuring Neurofibrillary Tangles as a Result of Rising Amyloid Beta without Microtubule-Associated Protein Tau (MAPT) Mutations 2024, 2025

$397,471.11
Using Long-Read Sequencing to Investigate the MAPT Locus and Transcripts in Neurodegeneration 2022, 2025

$402,500
Influence of Plaque Vicinity on Microglial and Astrocyte Gene Expression; Role of Human Tau and TREM2 2021, 2023

$344,658.27
Gene Expression Throughout Development of Pathology in APPKI Mice; Effects of Human Tau and Aging 2017, 2019

$394,374

Selected Publications

These published papers resulted from Cure Alzheimer’s Fund support.

Zheng, W., Jiang, Y., Wong, H. Y., Wong, W. W., Cheng, L. K. W., ... Hardy, J., Zetterberg, H., Fu, A. K.F, & Ip, N. Y. Targeted blood proteome profiling using NULISAseq identifies a high-performance biomarker panel for Aβ pathology quantification and staging, Alzheimer's & Dementia, January 30, 2026, Read More

Gezegen, H., Alaylıoğlu, M., Şahin, E., Swann, O., Veleva, E., Güven, G., Yaman, U., Salih, D. A., Bilgiç, B., Hanağası, H., Gürvit, H., Emre, M., Gezen-Ak, D., Dursun, E., Zetterberg, H., Hardy, J., Heslegrave, A., Shoai, M., & Samanci, B. Unravelling the plasma proteome: Pioneering biomarkers for differential dementia diagnosis, Alzheimer's & Dementia, July 4, 2025, Read More

Mckean, N. E., Liu, J., Rudiger, S. R., Kelly, J. M., McLaughlan, C., Verma, P. J., Hardy, J., Gusella, J. F., Zetterberg, H., Reid, S. J., Handley, R. H., Lehnert, K., Sutherland, G. T., Heslegrave, A., Veleva, E., Laban, R., Pearson, J. F., Bawden, S. C., & Snell, R. G. Presenilin 1 hemizygosity has no overt deleterious phenotypic outcomes in sheep: Potential implications for therapeutic targets in Alzheimer’s disease, Neurobiology of Aging, April 25, 2025, Read More

Ballard, C., Mobley, W., Hardy, J., Williams, G., & Corbett, A. Dementia in Down Syndrome, Lancet Neurology, April 11, 2016, Read More

Fu, H., Hardy, J., & Duff, K. E. Selective vulnerability in neurodegenerative diseases, Nature Neuroscience, September 24, 2018, Read More

Wood, J. I., Wong, E., Joghee, R., Balbaa, A., Vitanova, K. S., Stringer, K. M., Vanshoiack, A., Phelan, S. J., Launchbury, F., Desai, S., Tripathi, T., Hanrieder, J., Cummings, D. M., Hardy, J., & Edwards, F. A. Plaque contact and unimpaired Trem2 is required for the microglial response to amyloid pathology, Cell Reports, November 22, 2022, Read More

Benitez, D. P., Jiang, S., Wood, J., Wang, R., Hall, C. M., Peerboom, C., Wong, N., Stringer, K. M., Vitanova, K. S., Smith, V. C., Joshi, D., Saito, T., Saido, T. C., Hardy, J., Hanrieder, J., De Strooper, B., Salih, D. A., Tripathi, T., Edwards, F. A., & Cummings, D. M. Knock-in models related to Alzheimer’s disease: synaptic transmission, plaques and the role of microglia, Molecular Neurodegeneration, July 15, 2021, Read More

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