Neurologist Claire Clelland, M.D., Ph.D., M.Phil., knows exactly who benefits from her research on neurodegenerative diseases: her patients at the University of California at San Francisco, where she is the John D. French Alzheimer’s Foundation Endowed Chair, Assistant Professor of Neurology.
Clelland brings family members of those suffering from these diseases to talk to her researchers at The Clelland Lab about their experiences and their fears about the future. Clelland’s hopes to find breakthroughs that could help them and future families.
Clelland’s life’s work has been to search for a cure for dementia. She is currently using CRISPR gene editing technologies to discover novel therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. Clelland’s team creates models of these complex diseases using human cells and tissues, locating the changes needed in the genome to correct them. The remaining hurdle? Getting across the blood-brain barrier to one day deliver viable therapies that can address mutations and potentially reverse or halt disease progression.
“What we can’t do is get [potential therapies] into patients’ brains and spinal cords,” she says. “So the next step … is to develop technologies to deliver this technology safely and efficiently to patients.”
Clelland is a highly cited researcher, co-authoring dozens of papers. Her most recent finding, co-authored with DOC 2025 Faculty Dr. Li Gan at Weill Cornell Medicine, highlights a biomarker that could serve as a therapeutic target for frontotemporal dementia. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the New Investigator Award in 2024 from the National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center, the Grass Foundation Award in Neuroscience from the American Neurological Association, and the Therapeutics Prize from the National Women Academic Entrepreneurs. Clelland earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego, her M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, and her M.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. She completed her internship and residency in neurology at the University of California, San Francisco.
We are delighted to have Dr. Clelland join our DOC 2025 Faculty, and welcome her to the DOC community!