Researcher members

Research interests Dementia and resilience, dementia and long-stay care, psychosocial approaches to dementia.

Research interests Palliative Care, End of Life Care, Health Services Research, Informal carer support, Organization change, Community/ Long term care research

Research interests Professor Kumlesh K. Dev leads the Drug Development Group at Trinity College Dublin. His research focuses on discovery and development of therapeutics within the disease area of brain related illnesses. His group combines molecular, biochemical, cellular and pharmacologically approaches to examine the effects of marketed drugs and drugs in development on brain glial cell function, brain myelination, neuroinflammation and neurodegenerative processes. Prof Dev’s group also offers a range of collaborative projects with both clinical and pharmaceutical collaborators. With several years of expertise, his research group aims to develop novel approaches to therapy for a range of fatal and infantile diseases, such as NPC disease, Krabbe’s disease, Rett‘s syndrome, and Autism.

Research interests Preclinical: The primary interest of the research team is identification of the changes which occur in the aged brain, and in the brain of a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease, that lead to the well-described deficit in synaptic function. The emphasis is on the assessing the contribution of microglial activation to neuroinflammation and identifying the factor(s) that trigger microglial activation. Recent evidence has revealed that there is infiltration of peripheral immune cells into the brain which may occur as a consequence of the age-related and genotype-related increase in blood brain barrier permeability. The effect of these immune cells on resident cells in the brain is currently under investigation. A small element of our work aims to identify a blood-based biomarker that is indicative of loss of cognitive function. This aspect of the work is in collaboration with Brian Lawlor and Ian Robertson. Recent evidence has indicated that monocyte-derived macrophages, prepared from a cohort of individuals whose memory performance in a recall task was poorer than predicted based on their IQ, exhibit an increased response to TLR agonists compared with control individuals. This finding and other more recent findings suggest a change in the inflammatory response of cells from individuals with MCI and AD and is being further investigated.

Research interests Dementia in Down syndrome; Ageing and Intellectual Disability

Research interests Psychometrics, Assessment tools, Workplace Culture, Organisational Psychology, Health Psychology

Research interests Understanding differential decline in cognitive ageing and dementia, cognitive reserve, brain health, modifiable risk and protective factors and the development of interventions to prevent or delay the onset of decline

Research interests Dementia Housing Technology Community based interventions

Research interests Assessing cognition, Advance directives, Risk assessment

Research interests Movement Disorders, Advanced therapies in Parkinson’s disease, Deep brain stimulation, Hereditary Ataxia