Dr. Jackson received her BSc in biochemsitry from the University of St Andrews and went on to do her PhD in Neuroscience in the lab of Prof. Tara Spires-Jones at the University of Edinburgh. She then moved to Boston and the Lab of Prof. Bradley Hyman at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard where she continued her work looking at Apolipoprotein E in health and disease. While originally from sunny southern california, she has apparently decided she likes the cold and rain and in 2024 returned to Scotland as a principal investigator at the University of Dundee.  

Dr Jackson’s research is focused on Apolipoprotein E which is the greatest genetic risk factor for sporadic Alzheimers Disease. In particular she is looking at how both rare and common variants of the protein impact its structure, activity, and post-translational modifications and how these in turn cause the various impacts on the brain both in healthy aging and in neurodegenerative disease. She is using a combination of cell culture, in vivo models, and post-mortem brain to probe these questions with her primary aim being using that information to target ApoE therapeutically to help prevent or treat AD.