Eleanor Coffey, PhD, graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1990 and received her PhD in 1994 for her work in the laboratory of David Nicholls, PhD, at the University of Dundee. There she studied the regulation of neurotransmitter glutamate -- a chemical that brain cells use to communicate -- by proteins called protein kinases. She received a Wellcome Trust fellowship, followed by an Academy of Finland fellowship, to continue her study of protein kinases in the brain in the laboratory of Karl Åkerman in Finland. Since 2000, she has led an international research group that studies the function of protein kinases in the brain with a focus on neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders. Dr. Coffey has led a European consortium on major depressive disorder and published in highly ranked neuroscience journals. Her laboratory studies protein kinases JNK and LRRK2 (the main genetic contributor to Parkinson's disease) using research techniques such as pre-clinical models, imaging, fiber photometry and proteomics. She and her colleagues found that LRRK2 controls protein production in PD. They and are now developing biomarkers -- objective measures of disease -- that may be useful for diagnosis and tracking of Parkinson's.