Programme Chairs and Faculty

Professor John T O’Brien is Professor of Old Age Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge and Honorary Consultant Old Age Psychiatrist within Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Trust and Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust. He is also a National Institute for Health Research Emeritus Senior Investigator and a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences.

His research interests include: the application of neuroimaging in old age psychiatry; dementia with Lewy bodies; the role of vascular factors in dementia and depression and clinical trials. He has published over 600 peer-reviewed papers on these topics and has been  a member of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), British Association of Psychopharmacology, European Federation of Neurological Sciences and European Stroke Association Dementia Guideline groups. He is a recipient of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Lifetime Achievement award in Older People’s Mental Health.

His other current roles include being the NIHR National Specialty Lead for Dementia and Treasurer of the International Vas-Cog Society.

Iracema is an Associate Professor of Geriatric Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin and a Consultant Psychiatrist in St. James’s Hospital, Dublin.  Iracema spent four years with the Neuropsychiatry and Memory Group at Johns Hopkins, Baltimore before moving to the UK in 2002. In 2017 she was appointed Professor of Psychiatry in Ageing and Dementia at the University of Manchester. She moved to Dublin in 2019 to join the Global Brain Health Institute (www.gbhi.org), a joint program between Trinity College Dublin and the University of California San Francisco. Iracema has a particular interest in the neuropsychiatry of neurodegenerative movement disorders including Parkinson’s disease.  She recently completed the world’s largest RCT of a non-pharmacological intervention for people with Lewy body dementias (LBDs; the INVEST project). She developed and led the Greater Manchester clinical trials’ program for dementia for several years as principal investigator, and is Chief Investigator for EU-funded SENSE-Cog (www.sense-cog.eu), a five-year program involving 27 investigators researching the links among hearing, vision and cognitive impairment.   She is also building collaborations for dementia research in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India and is leading the ‘Research Roadmap for Dementia in Pakistan’ project, which is model for lower and middle-income countries (LMIC).

Ben studied natural science at Oxford University and medicine in London.  He completed his psychiatric training in Cambridge, including a PhD with Professor David Rubinsztein looking at autophagy up-regulating drugs as potential disease modifying agents in dementia.  He is currently a lecturer in older people’s health at the University of Cambridge and honorary consultant psychiatrist.  He is clinical lead for dementia in the East of England for the CRN, national lead for stratified medicine in dementia and co-organises the University MPhil in translational medicine.  He clinical director of the Gnodde Goldman Sachs unit for translational neuroscience and the Windsor Unit at Fulbourn Hospital which seek to connect patients with dementia to the latest research and clinical trials. 

Paul is an NIHR Intermediate Fellow at the NIHR Newcastle Biomedical Research Centre based at Newcastle University. His research interests include dementia with Lewy bodies and driving with dementia and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Along with Professor John-Paul Taylor and Ms Kirsty Olsen he led the development of National Guidelines for driving with dementia or MCI. These guidelines have been endorsed by the RCPsych and MSNAP among others. He and Kirsty Olsen are currently researching clinical predictors of driving safety in a project funded by the Alzheimer’s Society.

Sarah Pendlebury graduated in 1992 from Oxford and worked subsequently in London and France. She is Professor of Medicine and Old Age Neuroscience at the Wolfson Centre for Prevention of Stroke and Dementia, University of Oxford and Consultant Physician at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. As Clinical Lead for Dementia and Delirium she works closely with the Electronic Patient Record Team and senior hospital management to implement improvements to the process of care for older, multi-morbid and frail patients. Sarah’s research is supported by the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre and includes the cognitive impacts of cerebrovascular disease and acute illness and the interactions between vascular disease, neurodegeneration, co-morbidity and delirium.  She is  lead author on four books on TIA/stroke, geriatric medicine and neurology in general medicine and senior editor of Oxford Case Histories (OUP) covering the medical/surgical specialities; several of which are recommended reading for speciality exit examinations.

 

Professor Stewart is Consultant Neuropathologist at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, Glasgow, and holds honorary Associate Professor status at the University of Glasgow (Institute of Neuroscience & Psychology) and the University of Pennsylvania (Department of Neurosurgery).

Professor Stewart leads an internationally regarded research laboratory engaged in multiple programs investigating the pathologies of acute and long-term survival from traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Working with the unique and comprehensive Glasgow TBI Archive, Professor Stewart’s research describes the complex neuropathology of brain injury across a range of exposures and survivals, with particular reference to the link between TBI and neurodegenerative disease. Professor Stewart directs the FIELD study, which aims to describe lifelong health and dementia risk in former soccer, and is Co-PI on the multi-centre collaborative research program CONNECT-TBI.

Miia Kivipelto studied medicine at the University of Kuopio, became a registered medical doctor in 1999, and subsequently a specialist in geriatrics. She started to conduct research and gained her PhD in 2002 in Kuopio with a thesis on vascular risk factors with Alzheimer's disease. Between 2002 and 2005 Miia Kivipelto did her postdoc at Karolinska Institutet, KI, after which she worked at KIs Alzheimer's Centre, and at the Aging Research Center, ARC.

In 2006 Miia Kivipelto became an associate professor of neuroepidemiology and a research director at the University of Kuopio with support from the Academy of Finland and other sources. In 2010 she became a senior lecturer at KI. She has previously worked on assignments for the Swedish Council on Health Technology Assessment (SBU) and the National Board of Health and Welfare.

Miia Kivipelto has been the recipient of numerous prizes. In 2009 she was awarded the Academy of Finland Award for Social Impact, and in 2011 the Junior Chamber International Award as Outstanding Young Person, in Finland and Internationally.

Miia Kivipelto was appointed professor of clinical geriatric epidemiology at Karolinska Institutet in 2011.

She is also Director for Research and Development of Theme Aging at Karolinska University Hospital.

Dr Carter is a Consultant in Old Age Psychiatry and Senior Clinical Lecturer in Old Age Psychiatry at UCL.  She runs a fast-track cognitive disorder clinic for under 65s with cognitive impairment, and a community mental health team in Havering.

She has published research on services for young onset dementia in the UK and was the chief investigator for a three-year project (The Angela Project) funded by the Alzheimer’s Society to improve diagnosis and post-diagnostic support for younger people living with dementia.

She leads the Young Dementia Network’s Diagnosis and post-diagnosis workstream.

Prof Ramin Nilforooshan is Consultant Psychiatrist at Surrey and Borders Partnership and Visiting Professor at the University of Surrey (23 publications since 2011). In addition, he is the Associate Medical Director for tge Research & Development; a role which involves safety and accuracy of clinical trials and is also the Dementia Speciality Lead at Kent, Surrey and Sussex. His main research is on using IoT (Internet of Things) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology for dementia care. He is the recipient of numerous HSJ awards and £6.7M funding from NHS England, Innovate UK, the EU and other funders. He is the Principal Investigator and Chief Investigator for a number of national and international clinical trials and has considerable experience running clinical trials.

With a background in molecular biology and medicine, Prof Henrik Zetterberg has spent the past 15 years focusing on the development of biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease and other brain disorders - becoming a world expert in the process. He has published more than 1100 scientific articles and has received numerous awards.

Dr Shahid Zaman is a consultant psychiatrist and a neuroscientist who has published in the following areas: the molecular pharmacology of GABAA receptors, neurosteroids, hippocampal synaptic plasticity (long-term potentiation), familial Alzheimer’s disease (presenilin) and female autism.

He is interested in understanding the neuronal mechanisms that underlie deficits in learning and memory in people with intellectual disabilities and exploring ways of ameliorating or treating these.

He is currently involved in research in dementia in Down’s syndrome. There are plans to explore the role of sleep in memory and learning in this population.

Cath Mummery has been a consultant neurologist since 2002 and leads the cognitive disorders service at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. She studied medicine at UCH, trained in neurology at NHNN and Kings College Hospital, and gained a PhD in cognitive neurology at the Wellcome Department of Functional Imaging, UCL.

She is head of novel therapeutics at the Dementia Research Centre, UCL and has been senior investigator on over 20 early phase drug trials of disease modifying agents in dementias including genetic forms of Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia. She is deputy director for the Leonard Wolfson Experimental Neurology Centre at NHNN, a unit dedicated to early phase trials in neurodegeneration.

She was elected to the executive of the Association of British neurologists as services chair in 2017 and also works closely with the Royal College of Physicians, sitting on the medical specialties board and chairing the joint clinical neurosciences committee. As deputy director of the NHSE Neurosciences Clinical Reference Group, she is closely involved in work to enhance neurology care for patients.