Clare Mackay

Group Leader and Senior Research Fellow

Professor Clare Mackay's research focuses on using neuroimaging to understand risk for psychiatric and neurodegenerative disease. Her research group focuses on understanding mechanisms of risk by investigating how factors, such as particular genes, change brain structure and function before people are suffering from the symptoms of disease. Her interest in brain imaging began at the Magnetic Resonance and Image Analysis Research Centre (MARIARC) at the University of Liverpool before she moved to Oxford as a post-doc in 2000. Alongside developing an independent research career, she also managed the neuroimaging ‘half’ of the Oxford Centre for Clinical Magnetic Resonance Research (OCMR). She is the lead of The Translational Neuroimaging Group within the Neurobiology of Ageing section in the Department of Psychiatry, and is closely affiliated with the Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain (FMRIB). She is part of the team of co- applicants who secured funding to start the Oxford Parkinson’s Disease Centre (OPDC), and the Whitehall II imaging study. In 2012, she became the co-ordinator for Oxford Dementia and Ageing Research (OxDARE), with responsibility for bringing together Oxford’s diverse dementia research and clinical community for the Oxford Biomedical Research Centre.