SCoTT zEITLIn, PHD

Associate Professor of Neuroscience

University of Virginia School of Medicine

Dr. Scott Zeitlin is using mouse models to understand the structure and function of the Huntington’s disease protein and to help develop new therapeutic strategies for HD. Using knock-out, conditional knock-out, and protein domain deletion mutations within the normal and mutant Huntingtin proteins, he and his collaborators are studying how parts of the normal Huntingtin protein contribute to its function and modulate HD pathogenesis.

Dr. Zeitlin’s laboratory has also developed mouse models with regulatable normal and abnormal HD genes that are being used to understand the mechanism of HD pathogenesis. His mice are now the model most widely used by scientists worldwide to discover drugs that could be used to treat Huntington’s disease. Dr. Zeitlin was the 2019 recipient of the HDF’s Leslie Gehry Brenner Prize for Innovation in Science.