Impact
David Rubinsztein is Professor of Molecular Neurogenetics and a UK Dementia Research Institute Group Leader at the University of Cambridge, and Deputy Director of the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, where his laboratory is based. Trained in medicine and genetics at the University of Cape Town, he came to Cambridge in 1993 in genetic pathology. His research concerns autophagy, the bulk cellular recycling process, in the context of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's disease, which involve accumulation of aggregate-prone proteins. His laboratory showed that autophagy can degrade these proteins and pioneered autophagy upregulation as a potential therapeutic strategy, identifying drugs and new pathways that could be used for this purpose. He has also shown how autophagy defects contribute to disease and has contributed to the basic cell biology of the process, including its links to ageing and age-related neurodegeneration. His group currently also studies ferroptosis in neurodegeneration. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Academy of Medical Sciences and an EMBO member, and was listed as a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher from 2018 to 2023.
Metrics
- h-index 162 · google scholar as of 2026-09-23 source ↗