Maura Malpetti

Dr Maura Malpetti is a Senior Research Associate and Race Against Dementia Alzheimer’s Research UK Fellow in the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge. In 2024, she also joined the UK Dementia Research Institute at Cambridge as an Emerging Leader. She originally trained at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan, where she worked in nuclear medicine on FDG PET, and then at the University of Cambridge undertaking her doctoral studies in Clinical Neurosciences. After her PhD, she joined both the University of California San Francisco, and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich as visiting researcher.

Her research focusses on in vivo biomarkers for inflammation, tau, and synaptic loss to investigate the pathophysiology of primary tauopathies, frontotemporal dementia, and related disorders. To this end, her lab integrates PET imaging and clinical data with fluid markers and post-mortem pathology to identify and validate early diagnostic/prognostic markers and therapeutic targets that can inform the design of new disease-modifying treatment strategies. To facilitate real-world and clinical translation of research, she has established and leads the Open Network for Frontotemporal dementia Inflammation Research (ON-FIRE), which involves >20 UK-based centres and aims to accelerate research and clinical trial delivery for patients living with frontotemporal dementia.