Dr Arpan Mehta, Independent Investigator at the MRC PPU, is the recipient of the 51st Sir John Halliday Croom medal and lectureship. This annual prize, for research within the last five years, is named after Sir John Halliday Croom (1909-86), a past President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. He will deliver his talk later this month, on both his previous research on the commonest known mutation underlying amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (C9ORF72), and his current and future research goals focused on unravelling the role of kinases in the pathogenesis of ALS.