Patrick Cras

Former Chairman of the Department of Neurology of the Antwerp University Hospital and honorary profess​or of neurology at the University of Antwerp (Belgium), Patrick Cras trained as a medical doctor at the University of Antwerp (UA, 1983), as a research fellow in the Laboratory of Neuropathology at the Born Bunge Institute (1983-1985) and obtained a specialty certification and a PhD in neurology (1989). This was followed by a Fogarty Fellowship at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Ohio (1989-1991). He is one of the Vice-Presidents of the Belgian Advisory Committee on Bioethics and President (2024-2025). He is the Chairman of the European Board of Neurology (Union Européenne des Médecins Spécialistes) and a member of the Joint Educational Board of the European Academy of Neurology. His research interests involve dementia, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers, movement disorders and the neuropathology of neurodegenerative diseases. He is the director of the National CJD Reference Center and NeuroBiobank which determines CSF biomarkers for dementia and hosts a large research brain bank. He is also interested in the ethics of human experimentation, end-of-life decisions, euthanasia and research involving vulnerable subjects. He has been principal investigator in numerous pharmaceutical industry-sponsored studies on different compounds in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders. He (co-)authored more than 500 international peer-reviewed articles.