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Dr Helen Murray holds a Brain Research New Zealand Health Education Trust Alzheimer's Postdoctoral Fellowship. She completed her PhD at the University of Auckland with Professor Maurice Curtis and her thesis investigating how plasticity is altered in Alzheimer’s disease was nominated as one of the top 20 for the University of Auckland Best Doctoral Thesis award in 2017. Her postdoctoral research involves a unique collaboration between the Centre for Brain Research in Auckland and the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, USA. From 2018, until COVID-19 closed the borders, she divided her time between these two institutions to study how the olfactory system is affected in neurodegenerative conditions. As olfactory dysfunction is one of the earliest symptoms in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, her research investigates the first brain changes that occur in these diseases using novel tissue-labelling techniques. In 2019 the Neurological Foundation awarded Helen a small project grant towards her research costs. Her research expertise has opened up an opportunity for her to contribute to investigating the neurological effects of COVID-19. COVID-19’s striking impact on the brain For weeks, University of Auckland neuroscientist Helen Murray pored over scans of brain tissue from people who had died from COVID-19. She was collaborating with scientists in a government research agency in the United States, the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The focus of the research: what exactly does COVID-19 do to the brain? While COVID-19 is primarily a respiratory disease, it’s been estimated that a third of patients have a neurological or psychiatric diagnosis in the following 6 months. For patients who had been in intensive care, the risk of ischaemic stroke was nearly 7%. [1] “The most common severe neurological effects, stroke and encephalitis, can have life changing implications, especially for someone who is young and was previously healthy,” says Dr Murray. In the US, researchers last year obtained the brain tissue of 19 deceased COVID-19 patients from the pathology department of the University of Iowa College of Medicine and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City. 8 Headlines