I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Penn Frontotemporal Degeneration (FTD) Center in the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. My research is focused on understanding why some people fare better than others when faced with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal degeneration (FTD).

I am currently working on projects that aim to understand how socieconomic (e.g. neighborhood deprivation) and environmental factors (e.g. air pollution) are related to differences in disease progression in neurodegenerative disease, including, Alzheimer's disease, behavioral-variant FTD and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. I am also working on a project to try and improve our measurement of biological aging, using tools called epigenetic clocks, in under-represented populations so that we can use these tools to try and understand the biological mechanisms through which socioeconomic and environmental factors relate to differences in neurodegenerative disease outcomes.

I completed my PhD in Trinity College Dublin in 2021, under the supervision of Dr. Robert Whelan, in Trinity College Dublin where I applied data science and machine learning to neuroimaging to better understand cognitive reserve and resilience (i.e. why some people show better-than-expected cognitive function despite similar levels of disease or neurodegeneration). From 2021-2024, I completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston where I developed longitudinal models of resilience to Alzheimer’s disease biomarkers and investigated the role of key brain networks in resilience to Alzheimer's disease.