Associate Professor Laird is a mid-career researcher (16 years post-doc, including 24.5 months career disruption) working within the field of central nervous system disorders. Her research has a particular focus on the use of in vivo models (e.g. zebrafish and rodents) to study the mechanisms and potential treatments for neurological disorders. 

A/Prof Laird leads the Neurodegeneration Treatment Team, within the Macquarie Medicine School at Macquarie University. The team is composed of ten researchers who work together to study motor neuron disease and spinocerebellar ataxia type-3 (SCA3, also known as MJD). In 2018, the team was successful at producing and characterising the world’s first zebrafish model of spinocerebellar ataxia type-3 (also known as Machado Joseph Disease, MJD). They now use this model as a tool to test the effect of various potential treatments (drugs, peptides and gene modifications), together with other celular models and rodent models, with the greater aim of identifying effective disease treatments.

Additional areas of investigation include effects of mitochondrial dysfunction, altered metabolism and the gut microbiome-brain-axis in neurodegenerative disease. 

In addition to her love of conducting scientific research, A/Prof Laird enjoys mentoring and training the next generation of scientists. This plays out within her undergraduate and postgraduate teaching commitments, higher degree research supervision and team engagement. She thoroughly enjoys working together with her team members on exciting ideas and problem solving. It is through the success of that work that in 2024 A/Prof Laird was named in COSMOS Magazine's list of 50 Remarkable and Inspirational Women in Australian Science.

• Studying mitochondrial dysfunction in spinocerebellar ataxia-type 3 and motor neuron disease;
• Changes to the gut-microbiome-brain axis in neurodegenerative diseases and ways to target these for disease treatment;
• Role of glutamate induced excitotoxicity in the pathogenesis of spinocerebellar ataxia-type 3 and motor neuron disease;
• Studying cell-type vulnerability in genetic neurodegenerative diseases such as spinocerebellar ataxia-type 3 and motor neuron disease;
• Role of somatic expansion of trinucleotide repeat sequences in the pathogenesis of spinocerebellar ataxia type-3;

Recruiting higher degree research students for projects related to these topics.