Sonia Vallabh co-runs a prion research laboratory at the Broad Institute with her husband, Eric Minikel. In 2011, they learned Sonia had inherited from her mother a mutation that causes genetic prion disease, a fatal and currently untreatable neurodegenerative disease that typically strikes in midlife. The pair left their previous careers to devote their lives to biomedical research, earning their PhDs from Harvard Medical School in 2019. At Broad, Sonia works on prion disease drug discovery, focused on lowering prion protein in the brain. She works on biomarkers, natural history and tools to enable clinical trials in at-risk presymptomatic people.