Dr. Alison Goate is the Jean C and James W. Crystal Professor and Chair of the Dept. of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS). She has worked on the genetics of neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) since 1987, and is the founding director of the Ronald M. Loeb Center for Alzheimer’s disease at ISMMS. She reported the first mutation to cause familial Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Goate is also a leader in the study of late onset AD genetics using both GWAS and sequencing approaches. Her team demonstrated the enrichment of AD risk variants in microglial enhancers, regulatory elements that control gene expression in immune cells of the brain. She is now building upon these insights using genome-editing in induced pluripotent stem cells to understand the molecular mechanisms of disease and to develop novel therapeutics. Dr. Goate has received many awards for her research including the Potamkin Award from the American Academy of Neurology, the Khalid Iqbal Lifetime Achievement Award from the Alzheimer’s Association, the MetLife Award and the Rainwater Prize for Innovation in Neurodegeneration. She was elected a fellow of AAAS in 2012 and a fellow of the National Academy of Medicine in 2016.