IMPACT Dementia PhD studentship in Global Health

This PhD studentship is part of the IMPACT Dementia project, a major international partnership focused on developing novel health care solutions for people with dementia and their carers in Peru and across Latin America. The studentship sits within IMPACT work package 2, developing novel tools to improve dementia diagnosis. The project addresses a major challenge in low- and middle-income countries such as Peru: the assessment of cognition and its decline in people with different educational and social backgrounds from those in which traditional neuropsychological instruments have been developed. The PhD student will work on examining emerging cognitive tools and developing bespoke tests to measure memory, language, executive function, attention, social cognition and other cognitive domains. The student will take a role in designing tests and collecting cognitive data as well as analysing it alongside other demographic, clinical, biomarker and genetic data. Depending on the profile of the student, a particular focus could be the collection and analysis utilizing machine learning techniques of natural language data. The main academic supervisor will be Dr Chris Butler, Reader in Global Brain Health at Imperial College London with co-supervision from Professor Adam Hampshire. The successful applicant will join an internationally renowned research group within one of the world's top research universities. The Department of Brain Sciences has an excellent publication record in top rated research journals and is well funded from a wide range of sources. The IMPACT project is funded through the Global Health Policy and Systems Research programme of the NIHR and is a partnership between the Department of Brain Sciences at Imperial College London and the CRONICAS research group at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (UPCH) in Peru, involving other academic centres in the UK including the universities of Oxford, Cardiff and Edinburgh.