Alastair is a Clinical Senior Lecturer in the Preventive Neurology Unit at the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Queen Mary University of London, and a Neurology Registrar for Barts Health NHS Trust. His main research interests are Parkinson’s disease and related neurodegenerative disorders, particularly early identification and epidemiology, including environmental, clinical and genetic determinants. His other interests include objective measurement of motor and non-motor features of Parkinson’s.

Over the last 7 years he has led the PREDICT-PD study, which is a large cohort study that aims to identify those in the earliest stages of Parkinson’s, who may one day benefit from drugs that could slow or even halt the disease. Alongside PREDICT-PD he works on a variety of other observational studies, in the phases of Parkinson’s disease both pre-diagnosis and post-diagnosis.

He has nurtured an interest in genetic epidemiology and the use of common genetic variation to estimate the nature of causal relationships between a variety of risk factors and Parkinson’s (so-called Mendelian randomisation).

Alastair has a strong collaborative network, which includes collaborators at UCL, Bristol University, the National Institutes of Health, and 23andMe. He is a member of the International Parkinson’s Disease Genomics Consortium, Association of British Neurologists, American Academy of Neurology, Movement Disorders Society, and the Parkinson’s UK Cohort Studies Council.