Nuala Simpson

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Professor Dorothy Bishop’s group and part of the OSCCI team. I am working on a European Research Council funded project entitled ‘Cerebral Asymmetry: New Directions in Correlates and Etiology’ (CANDICE), which will look at the nature of language lateralisation.

As a molecular geneticist I will be researching what the impact of having an extra sex chromosome would be on language and laterality in a cohort of individuals with the sex chromosome trisomies XXX, XXY and XYY. I will look across the X and Y chromosomes, as well as the autosomes, in these individuals to see what genes could be involved and what those genes could be interacting with. We are particularly interested in genes involved in the connections in the brain. It could be that the different language outcomes for the individuals with trisomies depend on the particular genetic variants a person has, in combination with having an extra X or Y chromosome.

Previous to this position I worked on the genetics of specific language impairment (SLI) in Dr Dianne Newbury’s group at the University of Oxford where I was particularly interested in the role of copy number variants in the aetiology of SLI.

My interest in neurogenetics developed whilst working on a project that examined the genetic aetiology of autism, during which time I completed a DPhil. My project focused on regional association analysis and candidate gene screening.