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Spotlight on Dr Ian Harrison, Principal Research Fellow, Imaging Department (Div. of Med)
Each month we will interview a member of DoM Staff. This week we speak to Dr Ian Harrison, Principal Research Fellow, Department of Imaging (Div of Med)
1 February 2025
What is your current role and what do you enjoy most about your job?
I’m a Principal Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging (CABI) within the Division. I really love how varied my job is. Lab work, animal work, teaching, grant and paper writing, every day is different!
What are you working on at the moment?
My group work on the glymphatic system, which is a pathway in the brain involved in clearance of extracellular waste solutes while we sleep. We’re interested in how this system is involved in the development of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
The system itself is dependent on a water channel in the brain called aquaporin-4, so in the lab we are using drugs targeting this channel in animal models of disease to figure out what the effects are on brain pathology, using imaging to track disease progression and measure glymphatic function over time.
We’re also studying post-mortem brain tissue from people who had Parkinson’s disease in life to see how and why this water channel becomes dysregulated to contribute to disease in their brains.
We’re about to start some new work where we study mechanistically how this clearance pathway in the brain gets rid of proteins like tau and synuclein which build up in disease. Also, what sizes of protein aggregates are cleared and how aquaporin-4 is involved in that clearance. The aim is to develop a better therapeutic strategy to prevent against disease progression in patients.
What is your background, and how did you find your job in this field?
I did my BSc in Pharmacology at the University of Southampton, after which I moved back home to London to start an MRes in Experimental Neuroscience at Imperial College London. I loved that masters, as it gave me the opportunity to do research projects in three different labs across Imperial. I particularly enjoyed my project with Prof David Dexter, where I used human brain tissue from the Parkinson’s UK Brain Bank, so I applied for PhD funding to stay.
I got a place on an MRC 1+3-year PhD studentship, so studied for another MRes in the first year, this time in Experimental Physiology and Drug Discovery. I was one of two students on our intake of 10 to do the Bioimaging stream of this MRes, which is when I got interesting in all things in vivo imaging! In my PhD I used MRI alongside molecular and cellular techniques to study the neuroprotective effects of a class of epigenetic targeting drugs in a rodent model of Parkinson’s disease.
After I completed my PhD I was looking for a job where I could use the in vivo skills I’d learnt and could do more imaging work alongside my molecular and cellular neuroscience background. That’s when I found CABI, where Prof. Mark Lythgoe was advertising for a postdoc to lead a collaborative project with Eli Lilly looking to develop MRI biomarkers for mouse models of Alzheimer’s.
The initial contract was for 14 months, but I’ve been here ever since! I moved from grant to grant as a postdoc for 5 years before I was awarded parallel Research Fellowships from both Alzheimer’s Research UK and Parkinson’s UK, to start my own group at CABI. That was just over 5 years ago and am delighted to have just been awarded a Dementia Research Leader Fellowship from Alzheimer’s Society to continue our work at CABI.
What are your interests outside work?
I’ve got two small daughters (Ayla, 4, and Emilie, 6) who certainly keep me busy! But outside of that, I try to keep active by going to the gym in the evenings.
I also play the violin in my local symphony orchestra, which is an amazing way to switch off after work (your mind certainly can't wander back to what experiments you’ve got to do tomorrow when you're trying to get your head around Mahler’s use of accidentals!)
I’m also a keen baker and am currently trying to perfect my sourdough loaf. This is definitely baking for scientists as it involves maintaining an active starter culture. It can take a couple of days to prepare and bake a loaf, and often results in a complete disaster, much like some of my experiments in the lab!