Professor Maria Grazia Spillantini is the 2020 Thudichum Medal recipient, which is awarded to honour eminent scientists who have made outstanding contributions to neurochemistry and related subjects.

With her collaborators, Maria Grazia identified alpha-synuclein as the major component of the filaments that form the Lewy bodies in Parkinson’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies, and described one of the first mutations in the Tau gene leading to frontotemporal dementia and Parkinsonism linked to chromosome 17. Maria Grazia gave her Thudichum Medal lecture, entitled Alpha-synuclein, a central player in neurodegenerative diseases, at a webinar organised by the Biochemical Society and Portland Press and chaired by Professor Stefan Roberts, the Biochemical Society's Honorary Meetings Secretary.