Martina Bocchetta

Honorary Fellow

Martina is an honorary senior research fellow and currently holds an Alzheimer’s Society Junior Fellowship. She has a BSc and MSc from the University of Padua in Italy and then undertook a PhD at the University of Brescia in Italy in neuroscience. During her PhD she spent 18 months at UCL with our team working on understanding the role of the hypothalamus and the cerebellum in FTD using MR imaging. At the end of her PhD in 2015 she returned to UCL. Her research mainly focuses on the measurement of specific brain structures using MR imaging and how they are structurally and functionally connected in the different forms of FTD. Her work on the medial temporal lobe in semantic dementia was awarded the runner up prize at the 2018 ICFTD meeting and her work on thalamic subnuclei in FTD was awarded the 2019 FTD UK Early Career Researcher Clinical Science Prize. Martina is a lecturer at Brunel University London, a STEM Ambassador, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

  • ISFTD Early and Mid Career Online Symposium (virtual, November 2023): White matter microstructural changes in sporadic and genetic FTD using neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging
  • SINDem Webinar series (virtual, May 2023): MRI in frontotemporal dementia: what have we learnt so far?
  • 15th CONy – Alzheimer’s Association and CONy Joint Meeting on FTD (virtual, September 2021): Imaging biomarkers in FTD
  • AAIC 2021 (virtual, July 2021): From brain volumes to subgroup classification in genetic mutation carriers for frontotemporal dementia: a cluster analysis in the GENFI study
  • ISTAART Neuroimaging and FTD PIA webinar (virtual, June 2021): What have we learned from MRI in FTD in the last 10 years 
  • FTD UK 9th Annual Meeting (Cambridge, October 2019): Thalamic nuclei in frontotemporal dementia: mediodorsal nucleus involvement is universal but pulvinar atrophy is unique to C9orf72
  • 11th ICFTD (Sydney, November 2018): Progressive medial temporal subnuclei involvement in semantic dementia
  • 10th ICFTD (Munich, September 2016): Multimodal imaging analysis of C9orf72-associated FTD in the Genetic Frontotemporal dementia Initiative (GENFI) study
  • FTD UK 6th Annual Meeting (Cambridge, November 2016): Imaging of subcortical structures and their connections in FTD
  • AAIC 2015 (Washington, July 2015): Detailed structural analysis of the hypothalamus in behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia
  • ARUK Conference PhD Day 2015 (London, March 2015): Detailed structural analysis of the hypothalamus in behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia