Having completed a BSc in Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, Vikki first joined the Thuret lab during her MSc in Neuroscience at KCL, where she specialised in Neural Stem Cells and Nervous System Repair. During this time, she investigated the effects of caffeine on hippocampal neurogenesis, as part of the wider EU Consortium, ‘Diet Cognition and Plasticity’. She returned to the Thuret lab in 2021 to begin her PhD, under co-supervision by Prof. Alexandra Santos at KCL’s Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine.

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As part of the Wellcome Trust PhD programme ‘Neuro-Immune Interactions in Health and Disease’, Vikki’s project aims at understanding how food allergy impacts children’s mental health and cognition. Specifically, her project will investigate hippocampal neurogenesis as a potential underlying biological mechanism associated with these mental health changes and will ultimately try to identify which food allergy-induced immune factors may be responsible for any such observed changes.

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My PhD work focuses on understanding the ageing process in neural stem cells and how we might apply this knowledge to slow down or rescue signs of cellular ageing through the action of novel anti-ageing compounds. To this end, I am working to generate an accelerated model of cellular ageing in human neural stem cells that replicates various hallmarks of physiological ageing related to DNA damage, senescence, loss of proteostasis and mitochondrial dysfunction. With this in place, I plan to identify clinically-approved drugs not previously recognised for their anti-ageing potential by assessing whether they can reverse changes in the levels of genes known to change during ageing. Such drugs will be screened against this cellular ageing model for their ability to protect against ageing hallmarks and rejuvenate aged neural stem cells. As part of my iCASE PhD studentship, I have the good fortune to be doing a placement in industry with our partners at MSD UK, which is where I will carry out much of the drug screening.  

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Tinne completed her BSc at Aarhus University, and following her MSc at the University of Copenhagen. After working at the University of Copenhagen as a research assistant, she moved to London to pursue her PhD. Tinne is a PhD student in the Wellcome Trust PhD Training Programme on Neuroimmune Interactions in Health & Disease.

She is co-supervised by Prof Sandrine Thuret and Prof Linda Klavinskis. Her project investigates how neural stem cells switch fate to communicate with immune cells in the context of inflammation. 

Chiara completed her BSc in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Southampton followed by her MSc in Neuroscience at King's College London. She then carried out her PhD in the Thuret laboratory at the IoPPN of King's College London. She is now a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stavanger University Hospital. Her research is aimed at understanding the process of adult neurogenesis in the context of health and disease. During her PhD, she focussed on the impact of nutrition and lifestyle on neurogenesis and cognition during ageing using both epidemiological and wet lab methodologies.

Chiara is currently working with Prof. Thuret and Prof. Aarsland on the “ACID” clinical trial which is aimed at delineating the therapeutic potential of anthocyanin supplementation in older adults at risk for dementia.

Edina is leading the validation of a prognostic biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease using an in vitro neurogenesis assay and investigating how changes in gut microbiota composition mediate the neuroinflammation, neuroplasticity changes and cognitive dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease.

Hyunah is interested in how hippocampal neurogenesis (HN) can be studied and exploited for research and intervention purposes in Alzheimer’s disease. For her PhD, she studied how a common genetic polymorphism (APOE) can alter the process of HN using isogenic human iPSCs.

At the moment, she is looking into the potentials of developing an in vitro assay of HN as a ‘cellular assay biomarker’ than can predict the progression of AD in a given individual. This involves measuring various cellular readouts of HN such as proliferation, apoptosis, neural stemcellness and neuronal differentiation from proliferating and differentiating human hippocampal progenitor cells that are treated with human serum samples.

Sahand completed his BSc in biomedical sciences at the University of Westminster. Followingly, he completed his MSc in Biomedical and Molecular Science Research at King’s College London. During his MSc, Sahand was based at Fruhwirth Lab at Guy’s Cancer Centre where his research was focused on characterisation of the dual fluorescent fate mapping reporter in murine breast cancer cell line. Sahand is now doing his PhD with Professor Sandrine Thuret, Dr Brendon Stubbs, and Dr Marc-David Ruepp. 

Sahand is now doing his PhD with Professor Sandrine Thuret, Dr Brendon Stubbs, and Dr Marc-David Ruepp. He is investigating the role of exercise on cognition improvements and adult hippocampal neurogenesis in middle aged humans.

Zarah is a KCL Wellcome PhD fellow in mental health research for healthcare professionals and is a GPhC-registered Pharmacist.

She graduated from the University of Bath after completing the MPharm, before undertaking a cross-sector pre-registration training programme with GSK and Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust. Continuing in R&D at GSK, she managed the supply and distribution of investigational medicinal products to early phase, oncology clinical trials globally.

She subsequently completed an MSc in Dementia Research at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology and worked with the CannTEEN research team within the Clinical Psychopharmacology Unit on a double-blind, placebo-controlled, pharmaco-fMRI study investigating the effects of cannabis in healthy participants. Her project focussed on the differences in acute effects of cannabis, with THC and different levels of CBD, on episodic memory and psychotomimetic symptoms between adolescents and adults.

Zarah is interested in the pathophysiology underlying mental health conditions in neurodegenerative diseases and drugs that may modulate these mechanisms. She will be supervised by Prof. Sandrine Thuret, Dr Anthony Vernon and Prof. Allan Young, and her PhD project will look at the impact of psilocybin on mood and cognitive function mediated by hippocampal neurogenesis and microglial activity in patients with major depressive disorder.

Curie is interested in the impact of lifestyle interventions, such as diet and exercise, on memory function, cognitive decline in the context of adult hippocampal neurogenesis. Her work is primarily in human cohorts and some lab-based in vitro work. She completed a BSc in Healthcare Science at the University of Nottingham followed by a MSc in Neuroscience at King’s College London. She then continued her time at King’s College London with Prof.

Sandrine Thuret and went on to receive a PhD as part of the Medical Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership investigating the impact of intermittent fasting and mastication on age-related cognitive decline and neural stem cell ageing in the context of adult hippocampal neurogenesis.

Curie has continued to work with Prof. Thuret and now also Dr Brendon Stubbs to work on a trial investigating the impact of exercise on cognition and the gut microbiota in middle aged healthy adults. Curie is also an advocate for equality and diversity within the workplace and within research. She is a member of the Culture, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion committee at King’s College London and has recently started working on discovering methods to close the ethnicity gap within human research.

Dr. Lucia Batzu is a Clinical Research Fellow to Professor Chaudhuri at King’s College London and the Parkinson’s Foundation Centre of Excellence, King’s College Hospital, London. She is interested in both motor and non-motor aspects of movement disorders, with a focus on cognitive dysfunction in Parkinson’s and molecular pathology and neuronal networks in genetic Parkinson’s disease.

She has been a Research Associate in the Division of Clinical Geriatrics at the Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society at Karolinska Institute (Sweden), working on several research projects on neuroimaging in neurodegenerative diseases.

She graduated in Medicine at the University of Sassari (Italy) and recently completed her training as a Neurologist with the highest marks.

Lucia is currently working as a Clinical Trials Physician at King’s College Hospital London. She is also a member of the International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society (IPMDS).