Dr. Standaert was born in New York, NY and spent most of his early years in Bethesda, Maryland. He graduated from Harvard College in 1982 with an AB in Biochemistry. He received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Washington University in St. Louis in Medicine and Pharmacology in 1988. He completed a one-year internship in Medicine at Jewish Hospital of St. Louis in 1989 and a three-year Neurology residency in 1992 at the University of Pennsylvania. He was appointed a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Physician Research Fellow, and completed a three-year research and clinical fellowship in Neurology (Movement Disorders) at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in 1995.  After finishing his Fellowship at MGH he was appointed to faculty and subsequently promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. 

Dr. Standaert joined the Faculty at UAB in July of 2006 and holds John and Juanelle Strain Professor of Neurology Endowed Chair. He serves as a Vice-Chair of the Department of Neurology, the Director of the Division of Movement Disorders in the Department of Neurology, the Director of the American Parkinson Disease Association (APDA) Advanced Center for Parkinson Research at UAB, and is the Director of the Center for Neurodegeneration and Experimental Therapeutics. He sees patients in a weekly clinic and oversees many clinical trials for new treatments of Parkinson's disease.

Dr. Standaert is currently licensed to practice medicine in the states of Massachusetts and Alabama and was board certified in Neurology 1993 by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.

Dr. Standaert’s laboratory works on understanding both the root causes of Parkinson’s disease as well as the origin of the disabling symptoms that appear after long term treatment of the disease. Recently, his group has focused on the role of abnormal gene expression in brain as a cause of Parkinson disease. They are using new animal models of Parkinson’s, including both conventional transgenic mice as well a model produced using a viral approach similar to “gene therapy.” The analysis of these models is conducted with advanced tools including both Laser Capture Microdissection, which allows isolation of a single cell, as well as gene array techniques to study as many as 36,000 genes in a single experiment. Dr. Standaert’s laboratory is also interested in the cause of “wearing off” and “dyskinesias” which occur in patients treated with levodopa, and has uncovered evidence which may lead to new treatments for these disabling problems. His laboratory work has been reported in over 80 peer reviewed publications.

We are pleased and honored that Dr. Standaert will join us on the 12th.  Please make plans to be there!