Jamie is a Marie Curie PhD student that joined the NeuroD group in October 2025, after moving from New Zealand. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree and postgraduate Honour’s degree in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. During this time, he worked on Huntington’s disease under the supervision of Professor Russell Snell, which is when Jamie first became interested in working on therapies for polyglutamine disorders.
For his PhD, Jamie will research into a family of diseases caused by repeat-expansion mutations in a gene called ataxin-2, through two major approaches. The first will involve generating disease models to investigate how these different mutations lead to the neurodegenerative conditions they cause. Having generated these disease models, he will then test and develop allele-specific antisense oligonucleotides to treat the diseases, using the combined expertise of the NeuroD group and his Marie Curie programme, the EFFecT network, to support the development of these treatments.