Sonia Vallabh, PhD

Senior Group Leader at Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard

Speaker

Sonia Vallabh co-runs a prion research laboratory at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard along with her husband, Eric Minikel. She earned her PhD in Biological and Biomedical Sciences from Harvard Medical School in 2019. Sonia and Eric left their previous careers to devote their lives to biomedical research after learning in 2011 that Sonia had inherited from her mother a mutation that causes genetic prion disease, a rapidly fatal and currently untreatable neurodegenerative disease that typically strikes in midlife. At the Broad Institute, Sonia works on prion disease drug discovery, with a focus on lowering the amount of prion protein in the brain. She also works on biomarkers, natural history and other tools to enable meaningful clinical trials, including in presymptomatic people at risk.