Lydia LePage, MChem, PhD

Dr. Le Page completed her undergraduate and PhD training at the University of Oxford in the UK. Her doctoral work applied an emerging metabolic imaging technique to help understand cardiac metabolism in rat models of type 2 diabetes. Following a postdoc position at the University of Edinburgh where she expanded her imaging expertise into sodium and PET imaging, she moved to the University of California, San Francisco. Here, driven by a long-standing personal interest, she now applies her imaging expertise in the brain in Alzheimer's disease. So far her work has involved investigation of metabolism in neuroinflammation, where she has developed and applied imaging tools to help understand metabolic changes. Her BrightFocus Foundation funding will help expand the toolkit available to investigate brain metabolism in health and disease. Dr. Le Page also has a keen interest in science communication and science policy. She is a medical writer for Youreka Science, where she makes educational whiteboard videos explaining scientific topics. Most recently the team made videos for the free online textbook 'An Explorer's Guide to Biology', led by Prof. Ron Vale. Dr Le Page was also a 2020 Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellow, and spent 3 months in Washington DC at the National Academy of Medicine. In DC she worked with the Global Healthy Longevity Roadmap team, who are developing a comprehensive report assessing the challenges presented by population aging.