PostDoc & PhD students

Amer/ Francesca/ Helen

Amer Marzuki

Amer Marzuki

Amer develops and maintains the web application that is being used by clinicians to monitor people living with dementia remotely. The web application displays important information regarding patient wellbeing, as well as generating time-sensitive alerts that may require intervention by clinicians.

Francesca Palermo

Francesca Palermo

Francesca’s primary goal is to detect episodes of agitation in people living with dementia by applying a deep learning model on in-home monitoring data. Agitation is a neuropsychiatric symptom that negatively impacts the Activities of Daily Living and independence of individuals. Detecting agitation episodes can assist in providing early and timely interventions.

Helen Lai

Helen Lai

Helen is interested in the translation of group-level data to address individual-level needs. Working with health and social care providers as well as people with dementia, she is testing the implementation of digitally-enabled care within the local community. In parallel, she is extracting trends among people with dementia in population data, using domains such as multimorbidity and frailty to predict clinical outcomes such as infections.

Martin/ Mike/ Alina

Martin Tran

Martin Tran

Martin works as part of the Synthetic Biology group, where they aim to develop novel point-of-care diagnostics for early detection of infections in people living with dementia. His role is to use molecular biology techniques to characterise the urinary microbiome and bacterial strains responsible for infections, to identify potential biomarkers for detection.

Michael David

Michael David

Michael uses detailed MRI brain scans to assess damage within patient’s noradrenaline centre. The brain chemical noradrenaline is particularly important for attention. Attention - focusing on relevant information - is often affected early in Alzheimer’s disease. Patients notice early and disabling problems with attention and concentration, which worsen memory problems.

Hazel/ Adrien/ Roonak

Hazel May

Hazel May

Blast traumatic brain injury (bTBI) affects military and civilians and due to recent wars, their prevalence has increased. Milder cases of bTBI can go undetected and leave the brain vulnerable. Hazel’s work consists of investigating the outcome of blast shockwaves on the brain using an animal model. She investigates the physiological and neurological effects over time and will compare it to a computational model and human findings to better understand mild bTBI.

UK DRI


Established in 2017 by its principal funder the Medical Research Council, in partnership with Alzheimer's Society and Alzheimer’s Research UK, The UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) is the UK’s leading biomedical research institute dedicated to neurodegenerative diseases.