Alastair Noyce — Superstar
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome.
We are here today to mark and celebrate a significant milestone in the career of one of our most esteemed colleagues, Professor Alastair Noyce.
I am Gavin Giovannoni, a colleague and mentor of Alastair.
It is a great honour and pleasure to have been asked to introduce Alastair and to invite him to deliver his inaugural lecture as a newly anointed Professor at Queen Mary.
Alistair was born in Brent in North London and spent his early years in North-West London.
At age eight, his family moved to Cheshire, where, after sitting the 11-plus exams, he was selected to attend the Altrincham Boys’ Grammar School.
Alastair tells me he had too much fun at school and was a late developer. Hopefully, Alastair will tell you how he got into Barts and The London, now the medical faculty of Queen Mary University of London. He told me it was through clearing with a little help from some friends. However, once in medical school, he worked very hard and shone.
He was the top student on the intercalated Bachelor of Medical Sciences degree and graduated from medical school with distinction. He also represented Barts and The London School of Medicine in the pan-London gold medal competition.
Alastair’s parent, Peter and Sue, were pharmacists. Sadly, Alastair’s father passed away in 2017 from a glioblastoma but is with us in spirit today. Alastair, your father would be very proud of you. Sue, Alastair’s mother, is here today. Sue, welcome to this celebration of your son’s achievements. Alastair appears to be following in your husband’s footsteps. Alastair’s father was an academic pharmacist in Manchester and had been the head of the department for many years. He was awarded the Charter Gold Medal and a CBE from the late Queen.
It is well known that behind every successful man, there is a woman. Alastair is no exception. Alastair is married to the beautiful and very understanding Shahrzad, whom he met at medical school. They started dating in 2009 and married in 2014. They have two wonderful sons, Oliver and Oscar. It is an honour to have Shaz and Shaz’s family with us today.
Alastair and I crossed paths in 2007, just before you started your academic year two foundation training. Chris Hawkes introduced us and suggested that I supervise your academic rotation.
I then tried to sell you a multiple sclerosis research project, but this didn’t appeal to him. As a medical student, he had done a small research project with Chris Hawkes on olfaction in Parkinson’s disease, and he wanted to do a project on Parkinson’s disease. At this juncture, we came up with the idea of identifying early or prodromal Parkinson’s disease using a web-based platform implementing a software tool called the BRAIN Test online.
Alastair will tell you more about the BRAIN Test, but without Alastair, I suspect the BRAIN Test would not have been adopted and would have died a quiet death. Thank you for resuscitating it and allowing it to evolve.
The BRAIN test is close to my heart. For the geeks in the audience, I coded the first version of the BRAIN TEST in PASCAL, an almost extinct computer language, on a first-generation IBM XT PC that used an Intel 8088 processor. This was back in the early 90s. A friend rewrote the BRAIN TEST using the Assembler language to improve the software sensitivity to detect akinesia or freezing movements in people with PD. Alastair has had the BRAIN test rewritten in Javascript so it can run in a browser. The important thing is that it works.
This smallish project Alastair did as a young F2 was the seedling that grew into Predict PD and launched Alastair’s research career.
Alastair, you are a very good example of how early career exposure, such as a project on olfaction in PD in medical school, can cast the die for your future career.
At this point, I should review Alastair’s academic achievements and bore you to tears. I will try not to — in short, Alastair is an academic superstar.
Since 2017, he has received over £6 million in grant funding and collaborated on grants totalling more than £10 million. He has also assembled a team of over 25 staff.
He currently chairs the International Parkinson and Movement Disorders Society (MDS) Epidemiology Study Group and leads workstreams in the Global Parkinson’s Genetics Program (GP2). He has published over 150 research articles, and his citation ratings are soaring.
Getting Alastair to this point has been rather tortuous. It was always my ambition to start a preventive neurology unit, and Alastair was central casting for a component of this vision. So when Alastair decided to do a PhD on his baby, Predict PD, we needed to find supervisors who would nurture him and not clip his wings or steal Predict-PD. And, more importantly, allow Alastair, like a homing pigeon, to return to his roost at QM.
I thank Andrew Lees, Anette Schrag, and John Hardy for their excellent supervision, for nurturing him, and for allowing him to return to base.
From personal experience, I knew that to maximise Alastair’s chances of success, he needed formal training in epidemiology. I, therefore, made him take another year out and do an MSc in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. As expected, he shone and passed with distinction. I think Alastair would agree that this additional year of training helped turbocharge his research career. However, getting the London Deanery to allow him to take another year out of his neurology training was a battle we almost lost.
The next battle we had to fight was to get Alastair appointed as a full-time clinical senior lecturer at QM while he was still a neurology trainee. I thank Jack Cuzik for his support and belief in Alastair’s potential. Hopefully, Alastair’s precedent will help other precocious clinical academics start independent research careers earlier.
So, without further ado, please join me in extending a warm welcome to Professor Alastair Noyce as he discusses the fascinating contours of his life and research and the future implications of his work for our world. Hopefully, it will be a world free of the scourge of Parkinson’s disease. His lecture is appropriately entitled ‘PRE-occupied by Parkinson’s’.
Alastair’s inaugural lecture was delivered on Thursday, 18 April 2024.