Hazel Hall-Roberts

Hazel Hall-Roberts is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the UK Dementia Research Institute, Cardiff University, UK. She received her undergraduate degree from University of Bristol, UK, and a Ph.D. from the University of Bath, UK.

Dr Hall-Roberts' research focusses on the role of microglia in neurodegenerative diseases, specifically Alzheimer's disease, using in vitro models. As a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Dr Sally Cowley/Prof William James in the University of Oxford (2016-2020), Dr Hall-Roberts was trained in induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) culture and differentiation to macrophages and microglia. In collaboration with the Alzheimer's Research UK Oxford Drug Discovery Institute, she studied the impact of rare genetic variants associated with late-onset Alzheimer's disease risk upon microglia cell phenotype, using iPSC-macrophages as an in vitro microglia model. She then moved to the UK Dementia Research Institute at Cardiff University to head an ambitious project under Prof Julie Williams, generating new iPSC lines from Alzheimer's disease patients with high levels of polygenic risk, and studying their phenotypes when differentiated to iPSC-microglia-like cells.