Cyrus Zabetian, MD,MSc

Dr. Zabetian is a Professor of Neurology at the University of Washington and a Core Investigator in the Veterans Affairs (VA) Puget Sound Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center. He has served as PI on 16 funded studies on the genetics of Parkinson’s disease (PD) and authored/co-authored over 100 papers on the topic of genetics and biomarkers in PD and related disorders.

The primary goal of Dr. Zabetian’s research is to better understand the genetics of PD and other movement disorders. He founded the PD Cognitive Genetics Consortium, a collaborative network of NIH-funded sites that conducted one of the first large scale genetic analyses of cognition dysfunction in PD. He is currently the PI of a VA CSRD Merit grant seeking to discovery and validate new genes for hereditary movement disorders in large pedigrees, and to investigate the functional effects of the causal mutations found using in vitro and in vivo models. He is also PI of a VA BLRD Merit grant that will examine the genetic architecture of PD in African American and Latino participants in the Million Veteran Program using admixture mapping and local-ancestry aware GWAS. In a complementary project, he recently launched the first PD genetics consortium within the VA Health Care System with funding from GP2. The Veterans Parkinson’s Disease Genetics Initiative (Vet-PD) includes 22 VA medical centers across the country and is focused on enrolling Veterans from underrepresented populations.