Lunch Hour Lecture | Unravelling Dementia

About the lecture:

Unravelling Dementia: What Can a Tiny Fly Teach Us About Our Brains?

Dementia is now the UK's top killer, making it vital to understand why brain cells die. Our lab uses fruit flies – remarkable models with brain similarities to ours and short lives – to tackle this mystery. A key puzzle in dementia is why only some brain cells succumb while others resist. We investigate this selective vulnerability to find protective mechanisms and are also testing if common drugs, like metformin for diabetes, can shield brain cells from disease. Ultimately, insights from these tiny flies could lead to new strategies to defend human brain cells from disease.

UCL's popular public Lunch Hour Lecture series has been running at UCL since 1942, and showcases the exceptional research work being undertaken across UCL. Lectures are free and open to all and since 2020 have been held online.

About the speaker:

Dr Teresa Niccoli is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Healthy Ageing at UCL, which they joined as a Senior ARUK Fellow in 2019. Teresa completed their PhD with Paul Nurse at Cancer Research UK, studying cell polarity and microtubule dynamics in the yeast S. pombe. They then continued investigating cell polarity at the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge with Daniel St. Johnston. Teresa then took a 5-year career break to look after their two sons. In 2010, Teresa resumed their scientific career by joining Linda Partridge's lab at UCL to work on Drosophila models of neurodegeneration and continued this work in Adrian Isaac's laboratory at the Dementia Research Institute UCL.

About the chair:

Dr Kerri Kinghorn completed the MB/PhD programme at the University of Cambridge, graduating with a 1st class BA degree in Neuroscience in 2000 and a distinction in her medical degree in 2005. She gained her PhD in 2006 at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research under the supervision of Professor David Lomas. While completing her higher clinical training in Neurology in London, she was awarded a Wellcome Trust Post-Doctoral Clinician Scientist Fellowship. This was performed in the research groups of Professor Sir John Hardy and Professor Dame Linda Partridge at University College London (UCL). As part of her neurology training, she spent one year in Melbourne Australia as an Association of British Neurologists Australasian Fellow. Dr Kinghorn then took up a post as an Academic Clinical Lecturer in Neurology at Kings College London and completed her neurology training in 2017. Dr Kinghorn returned to UCL in 2017 as a Rosetrees UCL Excellence Fellow. In December 2018 she was awarded a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Career Development Fellowship. Dr Kinghorn is also an Honorary Consultant Neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.