Tim Bartels

Tim Bartels is Professor of Neurodegenerative Diseases at the UK Dementia Research Institute at University College London, where his laboratory investigates the molecular basis of Parkinson's disease and related synucleinopathies. He trained in chemistry at the Technical University of Munich (MSc, and PhD in biophysics), held postdoctoral fellowships in NMR and biophysics at the University of Arizona and in molecular biology at Harvard Medical School, and progressed through Instructor and Assistant Professor positions at Harvard / Brigham & Women's Hospital before establishing his independent laboratory at UCL in 2018.His work centres on α-synuclein, the protein whose aggregation defines Parkinson's disease, Dementia with Lewy Bodies, and Multiple System Atrophy. The Bartels lab is currently focused on how lipid-driven phase separation and gut-resident immune cells shape α-synuclein biology along the gut–brain axis, and on translating these mechanisms into clinically deployable dia