Rate My Professor Gwenaëlle Douaud

Gwenaëlle Douaud is Associate Professor at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow at Green Templeton College. She leads the Translational Image Analysis Group at the Oxford FMRIB Centre within the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging. After completing undergraduate studies in mathematics and fundamental physics in Paris, she specialised in neuroscience and genetics at the Institut Pasteur before earning her PhD from the University of Paris XI-Orsay in 2006. Her doctoral work focused on structural and diffusion imaging of Huntington’s disease. Since then, she has been based at the Oxford FMRIB Centre, where her research centres on translational neuroimaging methods applied to human neuroscience, including brain maturation, ageing, and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, and motor neuron disease.

Her group investigates the basal ganglia using high-resolution 7T MRI and analyses large-scale imaging datasets, notably from UK Biobank, to identify clinically relevant information. Key publications include the 2022 Nature paper on SARS-CoV-2-associated changes in brain structure in UK Biobank, the 2014 PNAS paper identifying a common brain network linking development, ageing, and vulnerability to disease, and the 2013 PNAS paper on B-vitamin treatment preventing Alzheimer’s-related grey matter atrophy. She holds an MRC Career Development Fellowship and has contributed to editorial and committee activities in neuroimaging.