Jonas Neher, PhD

Dr. Jonas Neher first studied Chemistry, Biochemistry and Neuroscience at the University of Darmstadt (Germany), at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) and at the University of Tuebingen (Germany). In 2005, he was then awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to pursue his PhD work at the University of Cambridge (UK). There he started working on the role of microglia in driving neurodegeneration, describing a novel form of microglia-dependent neuronal cell death (phagoptosis). In 2012, he returned to Tuebingen as a Roman Herzog Research Fellow to continue his work on the role of microglia in brain disease at the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research. There, his primary research focus became the role of microglia in Alzheimer’s disease, and in 2015, he was promoted to an independent group leader at the Hertie Institute and in 2017 also at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), where he continues his work. In 2018, his group demonstrated for the first time that microglia are capable of innate immune memory, with significant consequences for Alzheimer’s disease pathology. He has published more than 30 papers relating to microglia function in neurological disease and he combines histopathological and molecular profiling approaches to delineate the mechanisms of how the immune system contributes to Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders.