Race Against Dementia Mayo Clinic Fellow
Alzheimer Center Amsterdam/Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, USA
Dr Ellen Dicks was the first RAD-Mayo Clinic Fellow, appointed in 2020. She is based at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, USA and works in collaboration with the Alzheimer Center Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Dr Dicks completed her master’s degree in biology with a specialisation in biological information processing at the RWTH Aachen in Germany. During that time, she started to become interested in the brain processes that underlie cognitive function (such as memory) and how these processes are disrupted due to diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease. Ellen did her PhD at the Alzheimer Center Amsterdam to investigate the relationship between brain connectivity and cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease.
“With the excellent mentorship programme, combining both world-leading researchers and industry professionals, this fellowship provides an ideal platform to investigate my research questions.”
Dr Ellen Dicks
Research summary
Dr Dick’s work is part of a world-class research team that is developing a new disease model of age-associated neurodegeneration within a complex systems framework, using cutting edge multi-modal functional, structural, and molecular neuroimaging and neuropathological data from a large normal aging population and dementia patients.
As a RAD Mayo Fellow, Dr Dicks is investigating how measures of brain connectivity interact with and have downstream effects on other disease-related processes. This is crucial for further developing these measures as biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease, clinical trial development and to better understand the Alzheimer’s disease pathological cascade – with the ultimate goal to prevent brain connectivity loss from occurring.
