Featured Scientist: Feb. 2014
Dr. Mark Pook
By David Woods PhD
Brings passion and hope to a career in research and teaching.
As an Associate Professor at Brunel University London, Mark Pook has influenced a generation of students. But what influenced him to devote a career to unraveling a solution to Friedreich’s Ataxia? It started in 1993, he says, when he joined the laboratory of Dr. Susan Chamberlain, a genetic researcher who first localized the FA disease locus to chromosome 9 and who helped to set up the UK patient support group in FA. “She was a mentor who inspired me,” he says, and when the FA gene was identified in 1996, Mark was intrigued by the expanded GAA repeat molecular basis of the disease and he became determined to understand more about the disease by developing cell and mouse models as a means to finding FA treatments.