Speakers

My name is Donald and I’m a Senior Lecturer in Population Brain Health. 

My research aims to understand how genetics, lifestyle and environment influence population brain health. That means dementias like Alzheimer’s Disease, neurodegenerative conditions like motor neuron disease, and aspects of cognitive and brain health - things like memory, reaction time, and how your brain changes with age. 

I sometimes do work on psychological traits too, like depression and anxiety, and I’m very interested in some of the biases around who participates in research in the first place – because that influences what we think we know about the brain. From 2019-2023 I was lead for Applied Models and Digital Health at the Alzheimer’s Research UK Deep Phenotyping network, and you can read about that here. 

I’m a big believer in open, transparent science, so you can find my Open Science Framework page here, which includes things like preprints, analytic ‘coding’ scripts for past papers, and poster presentations I’ve brought to conferences. I enjoy talking to people about our research – here is a quick talk I gave at Bright Club (although beware the casual swearing at 7:50!).