Gal Bitan received his Ph.D in organic chemistry from the Hebrew University in 1996. He went on to pursue postdoctoral studies on the structural biology of ligand-receptor systems at Harvard Medical School/Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center and continued to tackling the problem of protein misfolding and aggregation at Harvard Medical School/Brigham and Women's Hospital. Dr. Bitan made fundamental contributions to the study of early events in the pathologic cascades that cause Alzheimer's disease. He introduced the use of the novel photochemical protein cross-linking technique, PICUP, for investigation of amyloid β-protein (Aβ) assembly and discovered one of the earliest oligomers in the assembly cascade, the paranucleus. In 2004, Dr. Bitan joined the Department of Neurology in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA where he is currently a Professor. He is interested in developing new therapeutic and diagnostic tools for neurodegenerative diseases and a better understanding of the process of abnormal protein aggregation, which underlies over 50 diseases. Dr. Bitan has published more than 140 papers and his H-index is 42. He has served on multiple NIH and VA study sections and as a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Biological Chemistry, Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience, Scientific Reports, Annals of Translational Medicine, and Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine.