Gillian is a geneticist who combines her research interests in neurodegeneration with teaching responsibilities.  She carried out her undergraduate degree in Genetics at the University of Glasgow, during which she spent a work placement year in the Research and Development Genetics section at Astrazeneca, Alderley Edge.  She graduated with a First Class MSci degree in 2001.  She then undertook a PhD in Genetics and Neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, working on a project looking for novel genetic factors for late-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD) with Professors John Powell and Simon Lovestone.  On completion of her PhD, Gillian was awarded an Alzheimer's Research Trust postdoctoral research fellowship and moved to the laboratory of Professor Richard Wade-Martins at the University of Oxford.  Here, she worked on optimising infectious BAC (iBAC) methodology to investigate functional differences between different haplotypes of the nicastrin gene, a potential risk factor for AD.  In 2008, she was awarded a fellowship from the Alzheimer's Society to use the iBAC method to study functional genetic variation in Abeta degrading enzymes, work she carried out at the Molecular Medicine Centre, University of Edinburgh.  During this time, she also became involved with the work of the Lothian Birth Cohorts and developed an interest in the genetic contribution to normal cognitive ageing.  In 2011, Gillian moved to the lab of Professor Thomas Gillingwater (University of Edinburgh) as a senior postdoctoral research fellow.  Her research demonstrated that Schwann cells are affected in spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and she developed a novel mouse model for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) that restored SMN expression to Schwann cells, ameliorating some, but not all, pathology.  She joined Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) as a Lecturer in 2015 and is interested in understanding more about the effect reduced SMN levels have on multiple pathologies in SMA and in investigating the potential epigenetic contribution to SMA pathology.