Jean-Francois Trempe obtained his PhD in biochemistry from the University of Oxford in 2007. After postdoctoral training at McGill University and the Montreal Neurological Institute, he became an assistant professor at McGill in 2013 and obtained tenure in 2019. His goal is to elucidate the function of proteins implicated in Parkinson’s disease (PD) through 3D structure determination. He received the New Investigator Award from the Parkinson Society Canada in 2014 and holds a Canada Research Chair in structural pharmacology. He has published 65 articles (h-index 33) on the topics of ubiquitin and neurodegenerative diseases. His most important contributions to date involve solving the structure of Parkin (Science 2013), which revealed the mechanism of inhibition of this important PD target, and the elucidation of PINK1 activation through autophosphorylation (EMBO Rep 2018; Molecular Cell 2022).