Welcoming our new KJCF Quest Fellows

I am a neuroscientist and writer. I was born and raised in Ghaziabad, India, which is where I completed my secondary education. I then went on to obtain a BA in Liberal Arts from Earlham College (USA), MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow (UK), and PhD in Translational Neuroscience from the University of Edinburgh (UK). Most recently, I conducted postdoctoral research in the UKRI Hub for Metabolic Psychiatry at Edinburgh. I also currently serve as the Chair of the British Neuroscience Association’s EDI Advisory Board.  

Before starting my research career, I held a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship through which I worked with HIV healthcare organisations around the globe. I have lived and worked in numerous countries on six continents, and this global experience shapes my approach to science, writing, and advocacy.

I’m an academic old age psychiatrist interested in the relationship between dementia and multiple long-term conditions (MLTC). I studied the epidemiology of MLTC with mental and brain health during a PhD and postdoctoral clinical lectureship at the University of Edinburgh alongside my clinical training. In 2022-2023, I spent a transformative year as an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute, University of California San Francisco. Since 2023, I’ve been working with people with dementia and cognitive symptoms in clinic and hospital settings, while continuing my research.

I enjoy making connections with colleagues and I co-lead an international work group for research into dementia with MLTC. My career aim is to address the real-world challenges faced by people affected by dementia, motivated by my patients and by Patient and Public Involvement contributors.

Since a young age, I had an inner desire to understand how life works. After completing my BSc on Biology at my home college, I joined the University of Edinburgh with a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellowship to undertake a PhD in Molecular Neuroscience. I then did my postdoc in Weill Cornell Medicine, focusing on metabolic mechanisms underlying Parkinson’s Disease, as part of ASAP, a new worldwide effort against PD. In parallel, I also participated in SPARK-NS, a translational drug discovery program. My findings provided novel insights into the molecular relationship between brain function and metabolism and how this could be exploited to design first-in-class therapeutics against neurodegenerative diseases. 

I will now focus on a bigger open question, how whole-body changes in metabolism, like in the case of diabetes, the most prevalent metabolic disorder of our times, affect the risk for developing neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease.