Meet our customers: Dayne Beccano-Kelly, UK DRI

Dr Dayne Beccano-Kelly obtained his BSc (Hons) in Biochemistry (with Industry) from the University of Leeds in 2006, before going on to complete my PhD on the relationship between stroke and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Both his undergraduate degree and PhD included an educational/professional placement at the Mayo clinic in Jacksonville, Florida working with human tissue under the direction of Dr. Dennis Dickson. He subsequently went on to investigate the potential neuro-protective effects of the feeding hormone leptin in Alzheimer's disease at the University of Dundee, Scotland, before becoming a senior post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia (Canada) Centre for Applied Neurogenetics (CAN). Here he worked on the longitudinal characterisation of genetically faithful parkinsonian models in an attempt to isolate changes in synaptic function over time in disease. In 2015, Dr Beccano-Kelly joined the University of Oxford as a Parkinson’s UK Career Development Fellow. Using human iPSCs as a model and with a focus of electrophysiology and calcium imaging as tools, he identified robust phenotypes relating to synaptic function and energy. In 2020, Dr Beccano-Kelly won the prestigious Future Leader Fellowship allowing him to carry out his work on early synaptic health in Parkinson’s disease as a Group Leader based at UK DRI at Cardiff from February 2021.