Sex and Gender Differences in Neurological Disease

Dr. Elena Moro graduated in Medicine at the University of Trieste (Italy) in 1989 and completed her residency in Neurology at the Catholic University in Rome (Italy) in 1996. She received her PhD in Neurosciences from the Catholic University in Rome, after having spent one and a half years in Grenoble, France (Joseph Fourier University), where she worked under the supervision of Dr. P. Pollak and Dr. A.L. Benabid. For her doctoral research Dr. Moro studied the response to levodopa and the electrical parameters of stimulation in parkinsonian patients with subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation. From 2000 to 2002 she moved to Milan (Italy) in order to start and develop a surgical team for Movement Disorders at the Niguarda Ca’ Granda Hospital. In 2002, she joined the Division of Neurology at the University of Toronto (Canada) as an Assistant Professor, and medical Director of the surgical program for Movement Disorders at the Toronto Western Hospital. She worked with Dr. A.M. Lozano and Dr. A.E. Lang. She was promoted to Associate Professor of Neurology of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, in 2009. In 2012 she moved to Grenoble, France, as Professor of Neurology at the Joseph Fourier University (CHU Grenoble). She is currently investigating the effects of DBS on gait in parkinsonian and dystonic patients, the role of the superior colliculus as biomarker in Parkinson’s disease and the effects of the pedunculopontine nucleus stimulation. She is also responsible of the neurology teaching for undergraduate students and residents in neurology at the Faculty of Medicine of the Joseph Fourier University. She has so far published 108 scientific papers cited in PubMed and she has been an invited speaker to more than 100 international scientific meetings. Prof. Gennarina Arabia is Associate Professor of Neurology at the University of Magna Graecia in Catanzaro. She collaborates with the Neuroimaging Center of the Italian National Research Council and, as Research Collaborator, with the Division of Epidemiology, Department of Health Sciences Research at the Mayo Clinic in the USA. Her main fields of interest include the epidemiology, clinical and neuroimaging of movement disorders. Since 2018 she coordinates the study group of the Italian Society of Neurology dedicated to Gender Medicine in Neurology. Dr. Tartaglia is an Associate Professor and Clinician-Scientist at the University of Toronto. She received her medical degree from McGill University, completed her residency at the University of Western Ontario and did three years of clinical/research fellowship in cognitive/behavioral neurology at the University of California, San Francisco Memory and Aging Center. She maintains a cognitive/behavioral clinic where she sees people with neurodegenerative disease and post-concussion syndrome within the UHN Memory Clinic. Her clinical and research interests lie in neurodegenerative diseases with a focus on frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) and possible chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Dr. Maria Teresa Ferretti is a neuroscientist and neuroimmunologist, expert in Alzheimer’s disease and gender medicine. In 2016, together with Dr. Schumacher-Dimech, Dr. Santuccione Chadha and Gautam Maitra, she co-founded the nonprofit organization “Women’s Brain Project” (where she currently serves as Chief Scientific Officer), a world leader in the study of sex and gender characteristics in brain and mental health as the gateway to precision medicine. After graduating in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Technologies at University of Cagliari (Italy), she studied and worked in England, Canada (where she earned a PhD in Pharmacology and Pharmacological Therapy at McGill University in Montreal), Switzerland and Austria. Her studies have been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including Nature, and she is regularly invited by leading scientific conferences to lecture on Alzheimer’s disease, precision medicine and the differences between men and women in neurology and psychiatry. She has taught in numerous university courses and is currently ‘External Teacher’ at the Medical University of Vienna; in addition, Dr. Ferretti is responsible for continuous medical education courses in the field of gender and precision medicine. Passionate about scientific communication and motivated by the desire to break the stigma on mental and brain diseases, she was a TED-x speaker in 2019 and in 2021; in 2021, together with Antonella Santuccione Chadha, she wrote the book for the general public ‘Una bambina senza testa’ (Edizioni Mondo Nuovo).