Professor Wendy Noble

About me:

Wendy is Professor of Molecular Neurobiology at the University of Exeter. Her work is focussed on understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative diseases, with a particular interest in tau.

Wendy graduated with a BSc Honours degree in Anatomy from the University of Edinburgh in 1996. Following a spell as a research assistant at the National Heart and Lung Institute working on a pioneering immunotherapy study, Wendy undertook a PhD at University College London (1998-2001).

It was during her first postdoctoral position at the Nathan Kline Institute/New York University, starting in 2001, that Wendy first began to work in dementia research. This was an exciting time to be working on tau, closely following identification of tau mutations that cause forms of dementia and development of the first models expressing mutant human tau. Wendy’s work examined some of the tau changes important for disease development, and this was expanded in an Alzheimer’s Society fellowship at King’s College London that Wendy started upon returning to the UK in 2004. This was followed by an MRC New Investigator Award in 2007 after which Wendy was appointed as Lecturer at King’s College London in 2010, becoming a senior Lecturer in 2015, Reader in 2018 and Professor in 2021.

Wendy leads a research programme to elucidate the molecular mechanisms underlying the development of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other tauopathies. These neurodegenerative diseases, for which there are no effective treatments, are characterised by deposits of abnormal tau that spread across the brain as disease progresses. We use rodent and human (iPS and iNP)-cells, transgenic rodent models of disease and post-mortem human brain.

• BSc Hons. (2.1) Anatomy, University of Edinburgh.
• PhD. University College London.
• PGCAP, King’s College London.