Associate Professor Yazi Ke is the Deputy Director (Operations) of the Dementia Research Centre and Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Macquarie University. After obtaining her PhD (Medicine) from University of Sydney (USyd) in Dec 2009, Yazi became a postdoctoral research associate at the Brain and Mind Research Institute, USyd (2010-2013). In July 2013, she moved to University of NSW (UNSW) to join the Dementia Research Unit headed by Prof. Lars Ittner as a research-only Lecturer with an ongoing ARC DECRA fellowship (2013-2016). During her time at UNSW, she was promoted to Senior Lecturer (July 2017) and is a successful recipient of the NHMRC Career Development Fellowship (R.D. Wright Biomedical; 2017-2020). 

Yazi has made seminal contributions throughout her research career to our current understanding of disease processes in frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Her research program and interests includes:

• Developing and characterising new and improved models of FTD and ALS using both traditional transgenesis and AAV approaches
• Deciphering the functions of pathogenic mutations in neurodegenerative diseases