DrDiana Benitez

I am a Project Coordinator at the UK Dementia Research Institute at Imperial College London.

I am a neuroscientist with 10 years of academic experience. I completed my BSc (Hons) in Biology at the UNAM, Mexico, where I was widely involved in the subject of Neuroendocrinology of Reproduction. Then, I obtained a MSc in Animal Biosciences from the University of Edinburgh at the Roslin Institute and the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies. During this time, I became interested in mental health and disorders research; my MSc project was focused on the Neurobiology of stress (Grundlwad et al., 2015). I also hold a PhD in Neurosciences, Physiology and Pharmacology from University College London, focused on Alzheimer's disease. My PhD unveiled how the interaction between microglia cells and amyloid-beta pathology affects hippocampal synaptic communication (patch-clamping and field recording experiments) (Benitez et al., 2021).

I joined Imperial in 2021 as project officer of the Multi-omics Atlas project (MAP) -a platform that aims to generate a well-characterised set of Alzheimer’s disease and control human brain tissue based on genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and lipidomic data. Currently, I also coordinate the costings and reporting of the Michael Uren Foundation Award (Uren projects) in the Department of Brain Sciences. I am also a former NHS honorary researcher; I coordinated clinical studies in dementia and multiple sclerosis.