Pierre-Francois PRADAT is a neurologist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital (Paris) and professor of neuroscience at the University of Ulster (United Kingdom). He is a researcher at the Biomedical Imaging Laboratory (Sorbonne University, Paris). He is a specialist in motor neuron diseases such as ALS and spinal muscular atrophy. After his internship in neurology in Paris, he obtained his Ph.D. in neuroscience and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University (Cambridge, USA). After initially studying animal models of motor neuron disease, he has latterly focused on biomarker identification in humans.