Dr Shelley Forrest is a group leader at the Dementia Research Centre in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Macquarie University. She completed her PhD in Neuroscience from The University of Sydney in 2013 and commenced postdoctoral training in the Discipline of Pathology, The University of Sydney. During this time, she has acquired a deep knowledge of the cellular abnormalities characteristic of frontotemporal dementia and related disorders, ageing and a range of neurodegenerative diseases. She has established national and international collaborations, and has been a member of international consortia that validated a novel age-related tauopathy. In 2020, Shelley joined the Dementia Research Centre as the Neuropathology group leader to facilitate the development of a neuropathology program combining human neurodegenerative diseases and transgenic models of dementia.

Shelley’s research focuses on the neuropathology and disease mechanisms underlying frontotemporal dementia, ageing and a range of neurodegenerative disorders. In particular, her work involves the investigation of protein abnormalities and cell types affected to determine the selective regional and cellular vulnerability in these disorders, and associated clinicopathological correlations. To address these questions, Shelley uses a combination of histology, immunohistochemistry and quantitative neuropathology in well-characterised human brain tissue samples and transgenic animal models of dementia.