Dr. Hugo Fernandes

Biography

Hugo Fernandes graduated with a degree in Biology from the University of Minho in Portugal and pursued research training at the Academic Medical Centre in the Netherlands and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. He completed his PhD at the University of Oxford in 2014, where he developed new human stem-cell models of disease to elucidate the role of genetic variants associated with Parkinson’s disease. Following this, he moved to the Wellcome Sanger Institute to develop and implement a range of high-throughput deep phenotyping tools, including single-cell lipidomics and genome-wide CRISPR-Cas9 screens. He expanded his work at the UK Dementia Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, focusing on the identification of novel targets for neurodegeneration. He returned to the University of Oxford in 2022 and was awarded the Alzheimer’s Society Dementia Research Leader Fellowship to start his own research program in the autumn of 2023. His research interests include understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying selective neuronal vulnerability in dementia and neurodegeneration, with a goal of identifying novel disease targets that will lead to effective therapeutic interventions. Current projects involve impaired lipid metabolism in dementia and exploring the molecular mechanisms underlying lipid perturbations in neuronal models. He emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in innovative research endeavors.

Research Interests