Andrew B. Singleton, Ph.D.
Title: Director, CARD
Project: Program Oversight
Contact: singleta@mail.nih.gov
Biography
Dr. Singleton received his B.Sc. from the University of Sunderland, UK and his Ph.D. from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. His postdoctoral studies were spent at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville Florida. Andrew moved to the National Institute on Aging at NIH Bethesda, MD in 2001 and became a principal investigator leading the Molecular Genetics Unit in 2002. In 2007 he became a tenured senior investigator at the National Institute on Aging, in 2008 he was named the Chief of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics, and in 2016 he was honored as an NIH Distinguished Investigator.
Dr. Singleton currently serves on the scientific advisory board of the Lewy Body Dementia Association; he is a member of the editorial boards of Neurodegenerative Diseases, Neurobiology of Disease (Associate Editor, Genetics), Neurogenetics, Movement Disorders, Brain (Associate Editor, Genetics), Lancet Neurology, the Journal of Parkinson's Disease, NPJ Parkinson's Disease (Associate Editor), and the Journal of Huntington's Disease. Dr. Singleton was awarded the Boehringer Mannheim Research Award in 2005, the NIH Director's Award in 2008 and again in 2016, and the Annemarie Opprecht Award for Parkinson's disease research in 2008. In 2012 Dr. Singleton became the first person to win the Jay van Andel Award for Outstanding Achievement in Parkinson's Disease Research. In 2017 he was awarded the American Academy of Neurology Movement Disorders Award and an Honorary Doctorate from his alma mater, the University of Sunderland.
Research Topics
Dr. Andrew Singleton has published more than 600 articles on a wide variety of topics. He leads a laboratory of about 50 staff, including five principal investigators and three group leaders. Singleton’s lab works on the genetic basis of neurological disorders including Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer’s disease, dystonia, ataxia, dementia with Lewy bodies, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). His team seeks to identify genetic variability that causes or contributes to disease and to use this knowledge to understand the underlying molecular processes. Most recently his work has expanded to the use of multimodal data in predicting disease. Dr. Singleton’s group discovered a number of genetic mutations that cause disease, including the alpha-synuclein multiplication mutation and mutations in LRRK2. Dr. Singleton was a founding member of the International Parkinson Disease Genomics Consortium, which has identified the majority of the known genetic risk factors for Parkinson disease.
Selected Publications
- Nalls MA, Blauwendraat C, Vallerga CL, et al. Identification of novel risk loci, causal insights, and heritable risk for Parkinson's disease: a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies. Lancet Neurol. 2019;18(12):1091-1102.
- Nalls MA, Pankratz N, Lill CM, et al. Large-scale meta-analysis of genome-wide association data identifies six new risk loci for Parkinson's disease. Nat Genet. 2014;46(9):989-93.
- Hernandez DG, Nalls MA, Gibbs JR, et al. Distinct DNA methylation changes highly correlated with chronological age in the human brain. Hum Mol Genet. 2011;20(6):1164-72.
- Singleton A, Hardy J. The Evolution of Genetics: Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Diseases. Neuron. 2016;90(6):1154-1163.
- Chang D, Nalls MA, Hallgrímsdóttir IB, et al. A meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies identifies 17 new Parkinson's disease risk loci. Nat Genet. 2017;49(10):1511-1516.