Marion M. Simmons

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Marion Simmons qualified in veterinary medicine and surgery at the University of Glasgow in 1983. She continued her academic studies at Glasgow as the John Crawford Scholar, obtaining a Masters in Veterinary Medicine for her work on the clinical presentation and pathology associated with Key –Gaskell syndrome in domestic cats. She was awarded a PhD in 1988 for her work on dysautonomias in domestic animals at Glasgow University as a Wellcome Scholar, with a focus on neuronal protein metabolism and ultrastructural neuronal pathology of Key Gaskell syndrome and equine grass sickness.

For the next three years she was a Medical Research Council post-doctoral research associate in the Muscular Dystrophy Group, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK, During which time she studied the pathology of the wobbler mouse as a model for motor neurone disease, and investigated the effects of age on resilience to axotomy in the neonatal mouse.

In 1991 Marion moved to the Central Veterinary Laboratory (which became the Veterinary Laboratories Agency, and is now AHVLA) where she joined the Neuropathology group, working on BSE. Since then, her work has continued to focus on BSE and the related transmissible spongiform encephalopathies of domestic animals, particularly scrapie in small ruminants. Her principal interests are in the pathology and pathogenesis of naturally occurring TSEs as explored through experimental models in the natural host, and the variability in natural and experimental disease phenotype and how this informs on infecting strain. She has led and been involved in many Defra, Food Standards Agency and EU funded projects in this subject area. She was awarded Fellowship of the Royal College of Pathologists (by publication) in recognition of her contributions to the literature in this subject area.

In addition to continued active involvement with the TSE research programme, Marion has been the head of the EU Community Reference Laboratory since its inception in 2002, and is also currently a nominated OIE expert for BSE and scrapie. In this context, she is heavily involved in overseeing and providing an international referral diagnostic service, and Quality Assurance programmes for the approaches used for disease detection and confirmation of TSE world-wide.