Louise Marshall
BA, Physiological Sciences, 2007-10
Dr Louise Marshall was tutored by Piers Nye and Peter Kohl during her Physiological Sciences degree. She was awarded the Gibbs Prize, Brackenbury Scholarship and Periam Prize for achieving the top grade in preliminary examinations in her year group. Her third-year experimental dissertation project with John Stein, during which she used visual evoked potentials to characterise magnocellular dysfunction in dyslexia, inspired her to pursue a career in cognitive neuroscience.
After graduating in 2010, Louise moved to UCL to work as a Research Assistant before undertaking a 4-year PhD in Neuroscience funded by the MRC from 2012, offering her the opportunity to train across the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the Institute of Neurology. She combined human behavioural, pharmacological, computational and genetics methods to interrogate the neuromodulatory mechanisms of learning and action under uncertainty.
Louise joined the Wellcome Trust after completing her PhD, first as a Grants Adviser (2017-18), then as a Science Officer in the Mental Health Priority Area (2018), and is now a Science Portfolio Manager. She is responsible for developing Wellcome’s Cognitive Neuroscience and Mental Health research portfolio. Her role involves advising scientists on their new ideas, analysing the evolving research landscape and identifying new areas that are ripe for innovation with strategic support. Working with experts across academia, medicine, industry, governments, philanthropy and patient and public groups, she shapes new discovery research to advance understanding of brain and behaviour, and to improve neurological and mental health treatments. She was also part of the team that created Wellcome’s new £200m initiative to transform global mental health.