Katie Lunnon

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT KATIE LUNNON

Katie is a Professor in Dementia Genomics at the University of Exeter Medical School, where she leads the neurodegeneration and dementia research theme within the Complex Disease Epigenomics Group. Katie started her lectureship at the University of Exeter in June 2013, and was fast tracked to Senior Lecturer in September 2015, Associate Professor in April 2017 and Professor in July 2019. She currently holds >£3.4 million in grant funding as principal investigator (PI) and has brought in >£4.6million as PI in the last 10 years since transitioning from a postdoctoral to an independent researcher, including grants as PI from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Medical Research Council (MRC). Her team are performing genome-scale analyses of genetic, epigenetic, transcriptomic and proteomic variation in post-mortem brain samples to identify new disease mechanisms and in blood samples to identify novel biomarkers. They are integrating these distinct molecular datasets to identify disease signatures that cut across different layers of genomic regulation. They are currently investigating several different neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, Dementia with Lewy Bodies, Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease.Katie was first author on the first genome-wide, cross-tissue epigenome-wide association study in Alzheimer’s disease in the journal “Nature Neuroscience” (IF = 28.8) which has been cited 489 times since its publication in 2014. She has since been lead (senior) author on several further follow up publications in this area, including one in the journal “Alzheimer’s and Dementia” (IF = 16.7) in 2018, which has been cited 122 times, and one published in June 2021 in the journal “Nature Communications” (IF = 17.7), which has already been cited 66 times in the last two years. To date she has 86 publications, including 8 first author and 28 last author publications, with an H-index of 43 and an i10-index of 73. She was awarded the 2019 Cavanagh prize from the British Neuropathological Society, which is a bi-annual award to a young European neuroscientist who has made a significant contribution to the understanding of Neuropathology of Human or Veterinary Neurological Disease. She was also awarded the Alzheimer’s Research UK Young Investigator of the Year award in 2017, which is awarded to the most outstanding early career researcher in the field of biomedical dementia research in an international competition for researchers with less than 10 years postdoctoral experience.