Dean's Award for Prince of Wales Clinical School Phd Student

Congratulations to Emma Devenney who was recently awarded the Dean's Award for Rising Star PhD student.

Emma is a medical graduate from Queen’s University, Belfast. She completed 3 years of her neurology training at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast before coming to Sydney as a visiting fellow and then stayed to undertake a PhD with Professor Kiernan and Professor Hodges. She was awarded a PhD scholarship from UNSW and has recently completed her PhD. Her PhD examined the clinical features of FTD, MND and the C9orf72 gene expansion. This body of work identified the clinical phenotype associated with the C9orf72 gene expansion and subsequently focused on the psychotic symptoms displayed by many of these carriers. Her work then identified the neural correlates and psychosocial factors associated with these symptoms, and finally a large family history study showed that psychiatric disorders aggregate within C9orf72 family members. She is currently completing her clinical training and is the MS fellow at RPA/BMC for A/Prof Barnett.