Dr. Belinda Kaskow is a geneticist and cellular immunologist working to understand the interplay of genes and environment on immune responses in neurologic disease. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Western Australia in genetics and six years of postdoctoral research under world-renowned neurologists Prof. Philip De Jager and Prof. Howard Weiner and immunology researcher A/Prof. Clare Baecher-Allan at the Ann Romney Centre for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. In 2021, Dr. Kaskow joined Prof. Allan Kermode’s lab in the Demyelinating Diseases group at the Perron Institute and Centre for Molecular Medicine at Murdoch University as a post-doctoral scientist and received the inaugural Eyewall Foundation Post-Doctoral Award. Her research program focuses on effector and regulatory T and B cells in Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and other neurologic diseases, novel methods to identify the antigen(s) responsible for MS and functional dissection of therole of genetic variants in neurologic disease. In addition to her research, Dr. Kaskow is a unit coordinator for GENE3340: Molecular Genetics and IMED1001: Form and Function at University of Western Australia. She is chair of the Perron Institute EMCR committee, holds positions on the AAMRI and Research Australia EMCR committees and is also a member of the Perron Research Strategy Team, the CMMIT leadership team and the MS Australia Research Management Council. In 2024, Dr Kaskow established the Demyelinating Diseases Consumer Advisory Group which partners with people with lived experience in MS to help direct her research program.