Ira Shoulson, MD, is founder and principal of Grey Matter Technologies Inc, a company focused on “making patients heard” by capturing and interpreting patient reports using natural language processing and machine learning, applying these technologies to clinical research and care. He is currently Professor of Neurology in the Center for Health + Technology (CHET) at the University of Rochester (Rochester, NY) and adjunct professor of Neurology at Georgetown University (Washington DC). From 2011 to July 2018, Dr. Shoulson was Professor of Neurology, Pharmacology and Human Science and Director of the Program for Regulatory Science and Medicine (PRSM) at Georgetown University, where he was principal investigator of the FDA-Georgetown University Collaborating Center of Excellence in  Regulatory Science and Innovation. From 1990 to 2011, Dr. Shoulson was the Louis C. Lasagna Professor of Experimental Therapeutics and Professor of Neurology, Pharmacology and Medicine at the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry in Rochester, New York.

He received his MD degree with Honors (1971) and postdoctoral training in medicine (1971-73) and neurology (1975-77) at the University of Rochester and in experimental therapeutics at the National Institutes of Health (1973-75). Dr. Shoulson founded the Parkinson Study Group in 1985 and the Huntington Study Group in 1994 — international academic consortia devoted to research and development of treatments for Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and related neurodegenerative and neurogenetic disorders. He was a key investigator in the US-Venezuela Collaborative Huntington Disease Project, which identified the gene responsible for this fatal hereditary disorder. Dr. Shoulson has served as principal investigator of the National Institutes of Health-sponsored trials Deprenyl and Tocopherol Antioxidative Therapy of Parkinsonism (DATATOP) and the Prospective Huntington At Risk Observational Study (PHAROS), and in the leadership of more than 45 other multi-center clinical research studies. He played an instrumental role in the development of 10 new drugs for neurological disorders, including for Parkinson’s disease (selegiline, lazabemide, pramipexole, entacapone, clozapine, rasagiline, rotigitine), Huntington’s disease (tetrabenazine, dutetetrabenazine) and attention deficit disorder (Concerta). He was formerly a health policy fellow in the US Senate, a member of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Council, president of the American Society for Experimental NeuroTherapeutics (ASENT), and associate editor of JAMA Neurology.

In 2016, he was recipient of the Robert A. Pritzker Prize for Leadership in Parkinson's Research from The Michael J. Fox Foundation. Dr. Shoulson is an elected member of    the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and has authored more than 340 scientific reports.