Email: portico-services@ucl.ac.uk
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- Senior Research Associate
- Neurodegenerative Diseases
- UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology
- Faculty of Brain Sciences
I am a clinical neuropsychologist and scientist. I have practiced clinically both in Spain and the UK. I have experience in the diagnosis and management of people with neurological conditions that impair cognition including:
- Neurodegenerative dementia: Alzheimer's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies and Frontotemporal dementia
- Parkinson and atypical parkinsonisms
- Motor neurone disease
- Traumatic brain injury
- Prion disease
- Stroke (MCA, PCA, and ACA and also thalamic infarction and CADASIL)
- Encephalitis (herpetic, paraneoplastic and non-paraneoplastic)
In 2014 I moved to London to join the Dementia Research Centre at UCL as a clinical academic.
I have particular expertise and passion in working with people living with progressive cognitive difficulties. This has led me to conduct studies on 1) how to improve the differential diagnosis in the clinical setting and 2) how to delay and compensate for functional decline.
My specific specialisms include:
- Complex interventions for atypical Alzheimer's Disease and Frontotemporal dementia
- Language and neuropsychological interventions for progressive aphasia
- Improving function for activities of daily living in Posterior Cortical Atrophy
- Neuropsychiatric symptoms in dementia, particularly dementia with Lewy Bodies
- Differential diagnosis of neurodegenerative dementia
Methodologically, I have the following expertise:
- Co-production
- Design, development and evaluation of assistive technologies
- Design, development and evaluation of complex interventions
- Qualitative methods
- Systematic reviews
- Cross-over design
- Single-case studies in cognitive rehabilitation
- Non-pharmacological RCT
- Structural imaging
I currently hold a Zinc UKRI Healthy Aging Catalyst Award for the project Making Reading Real, where I am leading the development a reading aid for people with brain-related visual impairment. I am also a co-investigator in the NIHR funded CICERO study, where I lead the trial of a cognitive rehabilitation intervention for people living with cognitive Covid.
Other research interests
I have led the translation, adaptation and current implementation of START in Spanish: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/psychiatry/research/mental-health-older-people/projects/start/downloads/start-spanish