Dr. Lars Bertram is Assistant Professor of Neurology, Assistant in Genetics at the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)/Harvard Medical School. At MGH, Dr. Bertram has spearheaded the analyses that led to the discovery of novel Alzheimer's loci on chromosomes 9 & 10. His current research projects focus on searching and characterizing the putative Alzheimer's genes underlying the loci identified in this and other studies.

In collaboration with the Alzheimer Research Forum, Dr. Bertram developed and coordinated the "AlzGene database" project, a large-scale data mining effort in which his team has collected all of the nearly 1,000 published genetic association papers in the field. Using the same methodology, Dr. Bertram's group this year launched two similar projects for genetic association studies of Parkinson's disease ("PDGene", funded by The Michael J. Fox Foundation), and schizophrenia ("SczGene", funded by NARSAD). Together, these databases will allow interested scientists to find in one place detailed information about any gene that shows significant risk effects across a multitude of different study populations.