About this site:

Most of the content comes from lectures on Parkinson’s that I gave at UCSF.  I decided to put this content into website format to enable me to “flip the classroom”, i.e., use classroom time for interactive activities rather than lecturing.  I decided to make the website public, because I shared the lecture slides with a number of people outside UCSF, from a variety of backgrounds, who indicated that they found it helpful.  I hope that this site will ultimately help to counter the significant misinformation that exists concerning Parkinson’s disease.  I am particularly alarmed by misconceptions about available therapeutics, which cause many patients to treat the disease in a sub-optimal fashion.  I am not a medical doctor and nothing on this website should be viewed as medical advice.  The views represented here are mine as a scientist, educator, and patient.

About the author:

I am a professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCSF, the University of California, San Francisco.  You can find lots more info about me–including publications, companies I’ve co-founded, etc.–on my professional website, jacobsonlab.org.  My scientific interest in neurodegenerative disorders actually preceded my personal interest.  I have been a member of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease at UCSF since 2009, and collaborated with scientists there on drug discovery for prion diseases, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob.  I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2012, at the age of 39.

The text and certain figures of this website by Matthew Jacobson are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.  Licenses for the figures not created by Matthew Jacobson vary, and include figures taken from government publications (no copyright), figures shared under various open access licenses, and figures reproduced with permission by the copyright holder.