The dementia detector

So you were now set on a research path? Yes. This was absolutely what I wanted to be doing. I moved to a research programme in Germany but continued to go back and forth to Boston.

My work was focused on vision, how we make sense of the information we get through our eyes and what happens when sight is disrupted through age or disease.

Because the brain is so complex, we realised that we needed computational tools to do this properly which took me back to my computer science and maths interests. We were using what we called data-driven approaches 15 years ago, before anyone was talking about AI.

How did you end up in Cambridge? I fell for British charm! I met my husband - a Brit - and wanted to come to the UK, so I applied to the University of Birmingham, which had one of the UK's first brain imaging centres. After a few years, Cambridge made me an offer I couldn't resist.

While I was at Birmingham, I gave a talk about my work and a clinician approached me afterwards to ask me about brain plasticity, whether we can continue to learn at different ages and if we can train the brain to overcome loss. He explained that he had patients coming to his clinic who looked as if they were in the early stages of dementia but he had nothing to offer them. He asked if I could help.

I didn't know anything about dementia at the time, but we started working on it, even though everyone told me not to. They said not only is it impossible to predict its progression, nobody wants you to, because there is no cure.

By then I had moved to Cambridge and I was struggling to get funding to pursue this research. But the University had embarked on a partnership with the University of Singapore and the University of California, Berkeley to co-fund risky projects. I applied and as well as some funding, I got access to game-changing Singaporean patient data from memory clinics.

For my team, this was a dream come true. We now had lots of high quality, unbiased data on which to test our models. Over time, we got more funding and are now able to talk about prediction and, hopefully, one day, prevention.

My hope is that by being able to detect dementia early and through a better understanding of how the brain adapts, we will be able to delay dementia - to the point of having no symptoms at all - through lifestyle changes alone.

As well as running your research lab, amongst other things, you are also an Alan Turing Fellow, a Royal Society Industry Fellow, and a challenge lead for the University's flagship AI mission, ai@cam. What drives you to get involved with so many different things? Research has no boundaries - and you should take any opportunity that comes your way. It's all about opening doors.

I didn't come to Cambridge to do incremental science, I came here to do something new. I won't see the results in my lifetime but I will, I hope, have made it possible for younger researchers to make the next leap forward.

One of the most important things I have learnt, is that to do good science we need input from different perspectives: from patients, from charities, from industry and from people with lived experience. By integrating real-life problems into fundamental science, we can make better, faster progress.