Dr Mootaz Salman

Biography

Dr Mootaz Salman is a Group Leader in Cellular Neuroscience and MRC Career Development Fellow at the University of Oxford. He also serves as Principal Investigator at the British Heart Foundation (BHF) Centre for Research Excellence, the UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) BHF Centre for Vascular Dementia Research, and the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery.

Following a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, Dr Salman joined the University of Oxford in 2020. He was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, which enabled him to initiate his independent research as a Departmental Research Lecturer. In 2023, he established the Salman Group at the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics (DPAG), supported by an MRC Career Development Fellowship and additional funding from the BBSRC Pioneer Award, European Research Council (ERC), CONNECT-Horizon2020, the Chief Scientist Office, and the Royal Society.

His research focuses on understanding the mechanisms of blood-brain barrier (BBB) function and dysfunction in neurodegenerative diseases and brain injuries. His group uses patient-derived stem cells to develop dynamic 3D multicellular in vitro models and brain organoids that faithfully replicate the structure and behaviour of the human BBB under mechanobiological stress, neuroinflammation, and other disease-relevant conditions.

Dr Salman’s contributions have been recognised with several prestigious awards, including the International Society of Neurochemistry (ISN) and Asia-Pacific Society for Neurochemistry (APSN) Young Neuroscientist Lectureship Award (2022), the Society for Experimental Biology (SEB) President’s Medal for the Cell Biology Section (2024), the Alzheimer’s Research UK (ARUK) David Hague Early Career Investigator of the Year (2024), and the inaugural ALBA-Roche Research Prize for Excellence in Neuroscience (2024).