Mathias Jucker (born 7 July 1961 in Zürich, Switzerland) is a Swiss neuroscientist, Professor, and a Director at the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research of the University of Tübingen.
In 2009 he was named a group leader at the DZNE in Tübingen, and in 2012 he became the founding coordinator of the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer's Disease Network (DIAN)[11] in Germany.
[12] Jucker's research has focused on understanding how certain proteins cause disease by adopting abnormal 3-dimensional shapes (conformations) in the nervous system.
In collaboration with Lary Walker, Jucker was the first to show in experimental mice that the accumulation of abnormally folded proteins in Alzheimer's disease occurs by a prion-like mechanism.
He found that changes in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers in mouse models closely resemble the changes in humans with Alzheimer's disease, and he and his colleagues showed that a protein in neurons known as neurofilament light chain can serve as a biomarker in the blood and cerebrospinal fluid that can be used to determine the progression of Alzheimer's Disease.