Dr Maura Malpetti

Dr Maura Malpetti is a Senior Research Associate and a Race Against Dementia Alzheimer’s Research UK Fellow in the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge, where she earned her PhD as a Cambridge Trust & Sidney Sussex College scholar. Her work aims to identify clinically relevant biomarkers and targets for early detection, more accurate prognosis and effective treatments in people living with these conditions.

She originally trained in Italy for a BSc in Psychology and an MSc in Cognitive Neurosciences, where she worked with brain scanning techiques, such as positron emission tomography (PET). After obtaining her PhD in Clinical Neurosciences in Cambridge, she further trained as a visiting researcher at the University of California San Francisco, and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

She is interested in the study of neuropathology, biomarkers and clinical features of neurodegenerative diseases, with special interest in frontotemporal lobar degeneration and Alzheimer's disease. Maura and her team focus on multimodal biomarkers to investigate the pathophysiology of these diseases, in order to identify early diagnostic and prognostic markers. Specifically, she is studying novel PET tracers and other biomarkers for inflammation, tau and synaptic loss, with an interdisciplinary approach that integrates multimodal imaging and clinical data with fluid markers and post-mortem pathology.