Claire Clelland, MD, PhD, MPhil, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco Weill Institute for Neurosciences, has been selected as the winner of the 2025 WashU Medicine Bold Pioneer Award. A ceremony to celebrate her will be held April 24, 2026, in the Jeffrey T. Fort Neuroscience Research Building Auditorium on the Washington University Medical Campus.
Clelland’s work stood out among a highly competitive pool of many applications, and the selection committee was particularly impressed by her unique approach, which is high-risk and will be impactful.
“This award encourages me to keep tackling this bold, but as yet unproven, approach to solving the challenge of brain delivery and creating new therapies for our patients,” Clelland said. “I am particularly honored to be recognized through this award by my colleagues who are leaders in neurology. Randy Bateman, MD, has been an inspiration to me — his work demonstrates that steadfast determination and sound science can change an entire field and improve the lives of patients. I am emboldened to continue this work, even when other paths would be easier or safer, and to continue to strive to cure our patients of their neurodegenerative diseases.”
Clelland leads an effort to revolutionize the way that human translational research is conducted. In the new age of human precision medicine, model systems that predict future clinical trial outcome and performance in patients are necessary. This is critical for diseases of the brain and spinal cord, for which animal models have often failed to identify therapies that will work in humans and do not predict key safety measures. To overcome this challenge, Clelland and her team at UCSF are using physiologically maintained deceased (perfused human cadavers) to test libraries of barcoded delivery vehicles that target the central nervous system (CNS). These delivery vehicles can be used to enable gene therapies and a myriad of other biologic therapies. Clelland also leads efforts to create new CRISPR gene therapies for neurologic diseases, including dementia and ALS.
About Clelland
Claire Clelland, MD, PhD, MPhil, is the John D. French Alzheimer’s Foundation Endowed Chair in the UCSF Department of Neurology. Clelland completed her degrees in Philosophy and Biology from the University of Portland, a PhD from UC San Diego for work conducted jointly at the Salk Institute and the Cambridge Centre for Brain Repair in the UK and an MPhil from Cambridge University. Her graduate work was funded through a Marshall Scholarship and Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Fellowship. She then went on to medical school at UCLA, residency and fellowship in Neurology at UCSF.
As a neurologist, she specializes in caring for patients with dementia and cognitive symptoms at the UCSF Memory & Aging Center. Her lab at the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences develops first-in-class therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. Her current work centers on creating novel CRISPR gene therapies for genetic forms of dementia and ALS, utilizing patient iPSCs to model disease, advanced sequencing technologies and cutting-edge CRISPR technologies. Clelland has developed human model systems to revolutionize the way new biologics are discovered and validated. As part of this effort, she co-chairs the NIH Somatic Cell Genome Engineering Consortium Steering Committee. She is the recipient of two national awards for neuroscience — the Alzheimer’s Association & NACC New Investigator Award and the American Neurologic Association’s Grass Foundation Award in Neuroscience. The Clelland lab is committed to promoting equity and justice in science in medicine. One of the pillars of the Clelland lab is the mentoring and advancement of trainees from underrepresented backgrounds to become the next generation of scientific leaders.
About the Bold Pioneer Award
The Bold Pioneer Award recognizes and encourages early career investigators who have demonstrated bold, pioneering research that is high-risk by virtue of being fundamentally different from standard approaches.
The winner of the award receives a personal $10,000 cash award, the chance to speak at a recognition ceremony and a medallion. Distinguished finalists receive a personal $2,000 cash award and a plaque.