Sir John Hardy was knighted in the 2022 New Year Honours for “services to human health in improving our understanding of dementia and neurodegenerative diseases.” The geneticist, born 9 November 1954, works at the Reta Lila Weston Institute of Neurological Studies at University College London.
His route there ran through several countries. Hardy took a science degree at the University of Leeds in 1976 and a PhD at Imperial College London in 1981, researching dopamine and amino acid neuropharmacology. Postdoctoral work followed at the MRC Neuropathogenesis Unit in Newcastle upon Tyne, then at the Swedish Brain Bank in Umeå, where he began working on Alzheimer’s disease.
From London to Florida and back
In 1985 he became an assistant professor of biochemistry at St. Mary’s Hospital, Imperial College London, and started genetic studies of Alzheimer’s there. He was an associate professor by 1989. In 1992 he took the Pfeiffer Endowed Chair of Alzheimer’s Research at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
The Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, hired him as a consultant and professor of neuroscience in 1996. He became chair of neuroscience there in 2000. A year later he moved to the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Maryland, as chief of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics. In 2007 he went back to London and took the Chair of Molecular Biology of Neurological Disease at UCL.
Prizes
The honors list is long. Hardy has won the Potamkin Prize for describing the first genetic mutations in the amyloid gene in Alzheimer’s disease, and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for work on the causes of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and frontotemporal dementia. The Breakthrough Prize was awarded on 29 November 2015.
In 2018 he shared the Brain Prize with Christian Haass, Bart De Strooper and Michel Goedert, for “groundbreaking research on the genetic and molecular basis of Alzheimer’s disease.”
The Royal Society elected him a Fellow in 2009. He also holds a 2014 award from the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s research, a 2022 Mayo Clinic Distinguished Alumni Award, and in 2023 became a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Rijeka.
