I am thrilled to have been awarded the 2024 Paulo Gontijo Award. This prestigious award recognises the impact and innovation of our work in ALS. I would like to thank Professor Al-Chalabi and Professor Dobson for their mentoring, my team for their hard work and support, and King’s College London and King’s College Hospital for providing the best possible environment for ALS researchers in their quests to tackle this disease.
Dr Alfredo Iacoangeli
09 December 2024
Dr Alfredo Iacoangeli receives the 2024 Paolo Gontijo Award
Dr Alfredo Iacoangeli was awarded the Paulo Gontijo award at the 35th International Symposium on ALS/MND on 6 December 2024 in Montreal, Canada.
Dr Alfredo Iacoangeli, Reader in Bioinformatics at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, received the 16th Paulo Gontijo Award — a prestigious international award recognising high-quality research in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) conducted by a young investigator.
Dr Iacoangeli is a Reader in the Department of Biostatistics & Health Informatics, Deputy Lead for the Motor Neuron Disease (MND) Theme at the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre, and a main investigator at the UK MND Research Institute. He is also the academic lead for partnerships at the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)-funded DRIVE-Health Centre for Doctoral Training at King’s, which is helping train the next generation of data scientists.
He received the award for his research on identifying ALS subgroups based on complex patterns in clinical and biological data across international datasets. ALS is characterised by highly variable clinical presentations and complex genetic and biological basis. Identifying ALS subgroups can lead to effective treatments, care provisions and clinical trials. This work utilised large-scale genomics and clinical datasets with machine learning to classify ALS patients into subtypes at first visit and with diagnostic and prognostic potential.
The Paulo Gontijo Institute is given by the Paulo Gontijo Institute in Brazil, recognising research work conducted by a basic or clinical researcher under 40. The award includes a gold model, $10,000 USD, and free invitations to the 35th International Symposium on ALS/MND and the ENCALS 2025 meeting.
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Reader in Bioinformatics