Tell us a bit about you, your career path to date and the institution you work for.

I graduated from the University of Southampton, England, with a First Class Honours Master in Neuroscience degree in 2018. It was during my Bachelors and Masters theses that I got the taste for academic life, which led to my move to Belgium to pursue my PhD at the KU Leuven in the Laboratory for Cognitive Neurology led by Professor Rik Vandenberghe. It was during my PhD in Biomedical Sciences that I became more of a specialist in Alzheimer’s disease and its molecular underpinnings, with a large focus on the early stages of the disease. I successfully defended my Doctoral Thesis in May 2023, before I moved to Sweden where I joined the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Nordberg Translational Molecular Imaging group led by Professor Agneta Nordberg. After a one-year postdoc, I moved to Amsterdam to become a Postdoctoral Researcher and Data Manager at the Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at the Amsterdam UMC in the group of Professor Frederik Barkhof. It is here that I get to perform research investigating the genetics of Alzheimer’s disease, but also look after our large European AMYPAD consortium. Working with such a large preclinical Alzheimer’s disease dataset with experts in the field who are willing to collaborate is definitely a highlight of being here at the Amsterdam UMC. Collaboration is never far away, nor is a helping hand to support those ever-appearing scientific questions.

Could you tell us a bit more about the type of research you are working on, and how it relates to AMYPAD?

As my PhD came to an end, we reached out to the AMYPAD Consortium about the possibility of acquiring genetic data from those parent cohorts who had it available, which was primarily to validate some findings from one of our research articles. Since then, over the last 18 months, I have been harmonising and integrating the genetic data within AMYPAD to improve the dataset. In the near future, we hope to release these data through our partner -the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative- so that other researchers can also utilise these data. More recently, I have become the Data Manager for AMYPAD. Among other duties, I oversee ongoing research activities, draft legal documents, and seek out new cohorts to join the Consortium. We aim to provide a large and rich dataset for representing preclinical Alzheimer’s disease to the wider research community so that we can all work towards understanding Alzheimer’s disease to prevent it.

What do you enjoy most about research?

I love learning new things. Every day is a new challenge in research, whether it be drafting a new agreement to obtain data from a new partner, struggling over statistical analysis code, or presenting to colleagues at international conferences. But even though there are struggles or challenges, once this progress there is a sense of satisfaction that comes with not only figuring something out but realising that you are contributing to progressing the field of Alzheimer’s disease. Learning something new every day, and knowing there is always a purpose to your work, and that any task, large or small, can be impactful, is the best!