Irene Mattioli

DPhil Biomedical and Clinical Science, 2025
Green Templeton College Medical Sciences Doctoral Training Scholarship (Oxford-GSK)

Irene Mattioli is a DPhil student in Biomedical and Clinical Sciences whose journey to Oxford first began in 2018. At the time, she was studying medicine in Italy and received an Erasmus Traineeship Scholarship, which allowed her to work at the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain (FMRIB) Centre for two months during the summer. It was here that she discovered her passion for medical research.

After graduating from medical school in 2019, Irene went on to complete her neurology training in Italy in January 2025, before starting to work as a neurologist. She has now returned to Oxford to research Alzheimer’s disease from a new perspective, which is investigating the clearance of proteins from the brain to the periphery in health and disease, to better characterize mechanisms involved in neurodegeneration.

Her work involves sampling cervical lymph nodes to study their different cellular and soluble contents across different groups, including young healthy individuals, healthy older adults, and patients with Alzheimer’s disease. The study explores how studying age-related changes in soluble neurodegeneration biomarkers in cervical lymph nodes can help elucidating the mechanisms underlying disease initiation and progression.