Prof. Valentina Escott-Price Cardiff University, UK

As an expert in ‘big data’, Prof. Valentina Escott-Price uses large datasets to identify risk genes and biological pathways for disease. First studying mathematics at St. Petersburg University, Russia, she went on to obtain her PhD in Statistics from Cardiff University in 2001. Since January 2002, she has been working... read morein the Department of Psychological Medicine at Cardiff University and, in 2017, she joined the UK Dementia Research Institute, where she is the programme lead in Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics. As part of the International Genomics of Alzheimer’s Project consortium, Valentina also helped discover 11 new susceptibility loci for Alzheimer’s disease. In 2015, she led the development of the first polygenic risk score (PRS) for Alzheimer’s disease, demonstrating the power of genetic profiling to predict individual risk.

By combining her strong background in Mathematics, Programming, Biostatistics and Genetics, she continues this work at UK DRI, developing cutting-edge mathematical approaches to study mechanisms of disease. By decoding the complex relationships in large-scale genetic and clinical data, her research aims to reveal how specific genes, gene networks and clinical information predict the onset and progression of dementia and dementia related disease and disorders. This research not only enhances the scientific understanding but will ultimately revolutionise personalised medicine approaches, potentially leading to more effective prevention and treatment strategies for neurodegenerative diseases.