Research Interests
Jon Cooper is a neuroscientist and neuropathologist who has been studying the pathogenesis of the neuronal ceroid lipofuscinoses (NCLs or Batten disease) and other lysosomal storage disorders for more than 20 years. His lab is the leading international center for the morphological analysis of pathological changes in the NCLs, documenting the onset and progression of neuropathological changes in all the available mouse models of NCL, and in a series of naturally occurring or engineered sheep and dog models. His lab has been involved in many international collaborations to study the efficacy of different pre-clinical interventions in these disorders, leading to several clinical trials and his work lead to an approved enzyme replacement treatment for CLN2 disease. Current research projects include the active role of glia in NCL pathogenesis; the presence of pathology in the spinal cord, peripheral and enteric nervous system; characterization of a CRISPR/Cas9 generated sheep model of CLN1 disease.
Following postdoctoral training in Europe and California, he was appointed to the faculty at King's College London, UK, where he was a Professor of Experimental Neuropathology, at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. In addition to his research role, he was also Head of Graduate Studies, running a graduate program across three campuses. He returned to the US in 2016 taking up a position as an Investigator at the Los Angeles BioMedical Research Institute and Professor of Pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He moved to Wash U in the summer of 2018 to join the expanding group of researchers working on Lysosomal Storage Disorders.