Corinne Lasmézas, DVM, PhD, is Professor at The Scripps Research Institute in Florida. She started her career at the French Atomic Energy Commission where she studied the interspecies transmission of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), established the transmission of BSE to primates and developed mouse and macaque models to study this disease. She also studied how infectious prions propagate from the gut to the brain, the role of the immune system and the neurodegenerative process. Her laboratory now focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying prion spread, neuronal dysfunction and loss in protein misfolding neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and prion diseases, and developing novel therapeutic approaches.