Tom Lloyd

Dr. Lloyd is a physician-scientist at Johns Hopkins University specializing in Hereditary Motor Neuron Diseases. He has a broad background in neuroscience and cell biology, beginning with graduate training in Dr. Hugo Bellen's lab on mechanisms of synaptic vesicle cycling and endosome/lysosome transport in Drosophila. He worked in the laboratory of Alex Kolodkin at Johns Hopkins during residency and fellowship on the generation and characterization of a Drosophila model of Hereditary Motor Neuropathy (HMN7B), and was awarded the Passano Young Investigator award and S. Weir Mitchell Award through the American Academy of Neurology for excellence in neuroscience research.

Since 2010, he has focused his research efforts on using Drosophila to investigate the pathomechanisms of inherited motor neurodegenerative diseases including CMT and ALS. He collaborates extensively with physician-scientists on the same floor who study these diseases in mouse and human iPS models and in patients including Jeff Rothstein and Charlotte Sumner. This approach has proven successful for CMT, including identifying novel pathomechanisms of HMN7B (caused by mutations in DCTN1), CMT type 2C (TRPV4), and CMT type 4J (FIG4) that have been validated in vertebrate models. Dr. Lloyd has served as co-director of the Johns Hopkins CMT Center and site Principal Investigator of the Inherited Neuropathy Consortium since 2010, during which time they have enrolled 262 CMT patients in the natural history and genetic studies.