20/11/25
Congratulations to Dr Richard Taylor, Research Fellow in Corinne Houart's research group, who has been awarded a 5-year fellowship jointly funded by Race Against Dementia and Alzheimer's Research UK.
Richard's work will focus on better understanding synapse resilience in healthy ageing, and how this knowledge can be leveraged to prevent dementia. In collaboration with Dr Fursham Hamid's research group, the project will use computational approaches, informed by experimental data, to identify RNA splice isoform changes at subcellular resolution in healthy ageing, and compare these with changes occurring in dementia. By identifying changes specific to healthy ageing brains, Richard aims to uncover age-related neuroprotective mechanisms that promote synapse resilience.
After identifying the RNA changes, Richard will turn to the zebrafish and killifish to model the effects of specific RNA changes on synapses and behaviour in aged animals. Richard will also be part of Marc-David Ruepp's group at the UK DRI at King's, and Jürg Bähler's group at the Institute of Healthy Ageing, UCL during the fellowship.
The Race Against Dementia Fellowships are designed to power outstanding early career scientists in their pursuit of innovative solutions to the big questions in dementia research. They encourage researchers to adopt the ‘Formula 1 mindset’ – characterised by rapid pace, innovation and relentless progress – and support them to do so with a bespoke training programme that aims to shake-up the status quo and accelerate dementia research.
You can find out more about the Fellowship on the Alzheimer's Research UK website.
