Dr Marcela Cespedes

Marcela has recently joined the Health Intelligence team within the Australian e-Health Research Centre as a Research Scientist. In this role, Marcela will continue to work across diverse teams within and external to the CSIRO analysing hospital mortality data.

This work follows on from her previous role as a CSIRO postdoctoral fellow. Marcela's postdoc projects included collaborating with US pharmaceutical company, Biogen, and medical researchers from the Australian Imaging, Biomarkers and Lifestyle (AIBL) study of ageing in order to develop new statistical approaches to better model Alzheimer's disease neurodegeneration.

Marcela was awarded her Doctorate in Bayesian approaches to model Alzheimer's disease neurodegeneration. This project involved developing and applying novel statistical approaches on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data to better understand brain atrophy in healthy ageing and Alzheimer's disease patients. This multidisciplinary project was in collaboration with the CSIRO AIBL study, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence and Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS).