Neurology

MRC Clinician Scientist Fellow

Board-Eligible Specilaist in Veterinary Neurology & Neurosurgery

Following a BSc with Honours in Physiology at The University of Edinburgh in 2004, Nina moved to Cambridge to train in Veterinary Medicine, gaining Membership of The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in 2010.  After a period in private companion animal practice in Warwickshire, she returned to Edinburgh in 2012 to complete a 7-year Wellcome Trust Integrated Training Fellowship for Veterinarians. This included a PhD in Molecular and Clinical Medicine in the Chandran lab, focused on tau protein and hypothermic preconditioning in human pluripotent stem cell-derived cortical neurons. During specialist training in Veterinary Neurology and Neurosurgery, Nina combined clinical work with post-doctoral research, extending the themes of neuro-glial cryobiology and proteostatic priming in the context of neuroprotection-regeneration. Her clinical research exploits advances in neuroimaging to understand human brain temperature and improve ante-mortem diagnostics and therapy for central nervous system disorders. Alongside this, Nina has developed biobanking resources needed to establish and validate spontaneous companion animal models of human neurodegenerative disorders through matched clinical and molecular phenotyping. Dr Rzechorzek is currently undertaking postdoctoral work at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, exploring circadian physiology in human neural systems. In 2019 she was awarded an MRC Clinician Scientist Fellowship to continue her research into brain temperature and neural clocks, launching the Circadian Brain Temperature (CiBraT) Study.