Blair R. Leavitt

Dr. Leavitt is a world-renowned translational neuroscientist and accomplished neurologist with extensive experience in both preclinical therapeutic development and clinical trials for neurodegenerative disorders.

A Senior Scientist at the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics, and a full Professor of Medical Genetics and Neurology at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Leavitt completed his undergraduate training and medical degree at McGill University in Montreal. This was followed by a medical internship at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York, and a neurology residency at Cornell and the Harvard Longwood Neurology Program. While in Boston, he also completed a basic neuroscience research fellowship supported by the Medical Research Council of Canada in the laboratory of Dr. Jeffrey Macklis at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital of Boston. Returning to Canada, Dr. Leavitt joined Michael Hayden’s lab at UBC for a Genetics Fellowship before starting his own laboratory.

A long-standing member and former Co-Chair of the Huntington Study Group, Dr. Leavitt is also a member of the European Huntington’s Disease Network, and a member of the Huntington’s Society of America Scientific Advisory Board. He is an established clinical trial investigator who has been involved in more than 25 clinical trials over the last 20 years. He is currently the Director of Research at the UBC Centre for Huntington’s Disease in Vancouver. Dr. Leavitt has an ongoing clinical research program in neurogenetics with a focus on Huntington’s disease (HD).

A laboratory scientist as well as a clinical neurologist, His research laboratory at UBC’s Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics is dedicated to translational pre-clinical neuroscience, successfully developing and testing new treatments for genetic diseases of the brain and spinal cord. Using genetically-modified mouse models of human disease as his primary tool, Dr. Leavitt’s academic research focuses on developing new therapies for devastating neurodegenerative diseases such as HD, FTD and ALS. Dr. Leavitt is currently the Director of the CMMT Transgenic Animal Facility. His research lab at UBC also includes programs searching for clinical biomarkers in HD and identifying new genetic causes of ataxia, epilepsy, neurodevelopmental disorders, and autism.

Dr. Leavitt is a founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Huntington’s Disease.

Dr. Leavitt is a sought after consultant to the pharmaceutical industry and has served as an advisor for Roche/Genentech, Takeda, Novartis, Teva, uniQure, Triplet, PTC, Raptor, Mitoconix, Ionis, and many others over the last 20 years. He is on the Scientific Advisory Board of sRNAlytics and is Co-founder, CEO, and the Chairman of the Board of Incisive Genetics Inc.