Meet the team: Dr. Tavia Evans

Profession: Postdoctoral researcher in precision epidemiology and neuroimaging at Erasmus MC, co-founder and chief of imaging of the UNITED consortium.

Educational background: Psychology (BSc), Clinical Epidemiology (MSc), Clinical Neuroscience (PhD).

Research focus: Neuroimaging of neurodegeneration, genetic and neural correlates of neuroimaging markers of the skull and brain.

Reason for founding UNITED: I want to understand the fine grained morphological changes due to neurodegenerative diseases and how this can be used to earlier diagnose and predict these diseases. Also the current state of research is not generalizable which underserves the majority of the world’s population – I want to change this!

Opinion on the current state of imaging research on neurodegeneration in your country: The Netherlands and Britain are well represented within research of neurodegenerative diseases. However these populations are currently and increasingly diverse and the population diversity is not reflected well within the research samples used. This needs to be improved to increase generalizability of the results and produce more personalized medicine.

Highlight of career: Attending and exhibiting at the AAIC 2019 for the soft launch of the UNITED consortium. I had the opportunity to discuss the aims with so many people from a range of countries and diverse backgrounds who shared the frustrations of the lack of representation in  neurodegeneration research and were keen and excited to learn more about the initiative.

Fun fact: I once represented a (non-Irish) European team in Gaelic football at the World games in Dublin (we came 4th! Lost out on a place in the final by 1 point to USA).