Allan J. Tobin, Ph.D.

Allan J. Tobin’s involvement with The ALS Association began in the early 1990s when he met former board member Bob Abendroth.  Abendroth invited Tobin to two of The Association’s Board of Trustees meetings, where the latter discussed the gene-search efforts of the Heredity Disease Foundation.  Together, these men organized a meeting at the Banbury Center at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, where researchers discussed neurodegeneration in ALS and Huntington’s disease.  

Dr. Tobin has extensive experience in neuroscience.  He worked at the University of California, Los Angeles for nearly three decades and served as Chair of the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program from 1989 – 1995.  Other posts he held at the university include Director of the Brain Research Institute, cofounder of the NeuroEngineering Training Program, and Eleanor Leslie Chair in Neuroscience.  His work in the laboratory at UCLA addressed basic mechanistic questions pertinent to Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, and spinal cord injury.   Dr. Tobin has also collaborated with The Association’s Chief Scientist, Lucie Bruijn, Ph.D., in discussing parallel efforts and goals on Huntington’s disease and ALS research.

Today, Dr. Tobin works at the CHDI Foundation, a privately funded organization dedicated to finding treatments for Huntington’s disease.  At CHDI, he leads efforts where researchers, chemists and biologists collaborate and share their research and clinical findings in the hope to find treatments that will halt or delay the progression of neurodegenerative diseases.

A graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T) and Harvard University, Dr. Tobin respectively holds an S.B. in Humanities and Science and a Ph.D. in Biophysics from these two institutions.  He also completed post-doctoral fellowships at the Weizmann Institute in Israel and at M.I.T.