Steve Gentleman

Steve Gentleman PhD, FRCPath is Head of the Division of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain Sciences at Imperial. He is the Scientific Director of the Parkinson’s UK Brain Bank at Imperial.

Since 1998, with the establishment of the Multiple Sclerosis Tissue Bank at Charing Cross & Westminster Medical School, Steve has had key roles in the development of brain banking for research both nationally and internationally. In 2008 he joined the BrainNet Europe (BNE) consortium of neuropathologists working to standardize the diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases and was part of the reference group for the BNE diagnostic criteria for Parkinson’s. He was an active member of the Medical Research Council Brain Bank Network management committee and is chair of the Brains for Dementia Research (BDR) management committee. Based on his extensive practical neuropathology experience he continues to contribute to the development of new consensus diagnostic criteria internationally.

Based on his work with the Parkinson’s UK Brain Bank, Steve and his team have published widely on various aspects of Parkinson’s pathology. This includes clinico-pathological studies looking at correlations between pathology and non-motor symptoms of Parkinson’s, Dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB) and Multiple System Atrophy (MSA). In other collaborations he has looked at the prion-like transmission of MSA to transgenic mice, large scale GWAS studies looking at genetic susceptibilities to pathology and some epigenetic studies. His team have also developed the FASTClear technique for making brain tissue transparent and have successfully adapted the technique for large blocks of human brain and for paraffin blocked tissue in diagnostic archives. This allows 3D visualization of complex anatomical circuitry and pathology without the loss of z-plane resolution seen in conventional confocal microscopy.