Dr Francesca Alves
BH-BMED, PhD

Dr Francesca Alves is an early-career dementia researcher at The Florey who aims to develop new drug targets for Alzheimer’s disease and related diseases. Her research focuses on interrogation of patient samples using multiomic technologies to inform and guide mechanistic discoveries in vitro and in vivo.

Dr Alves completed her PhD in 2022 at The University of Melbourne – Centre for Muscle Research, where she received the PhD Research Excellence Award. This was based on her research on several large animal studies investigating underlying metabolic dysregulation in multiple models of skeletal muscle atrophy. These findings parallel metabolic changes observed in the Alzheimer’s disease brain, triggering her move to the Florey in 2022.

Francesca’s first paper of her postdoctorate research began with a highly cited paper in Neurology (2023: FWCI 32.3) that revealed a striking correlation between anti-amyloid drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease and of brain volume loss (atrophy). This finding encouraged her to investigate alternative mechanisms leading to Alzheimer’s disease. Her recent analysis of multiomic datasets from Alzheimer’s disease brain biopsies has steered her to focus on bioenergetics and regulated cell death pathway called ferroptosis.

In 2024 Francesca received funding from the Jack Brockhoff Early Career Medical Research Grant, Bethlehem Griffiths Research Foundation grant and the Mason Foundation National Medical Program – ME/CFS research grant to expand her mechanistic and bioinformatic research in bioenergetic dysregulation.