Iracema Leroi

Dr Leroi has been a consultant for Lancashire Care Foundation Trust and an Honorary Senior Lecturer with the University of Manchester since 2002. Her special interest lies in the psychiatric aspects of neurodegenerative movement disorders. In particular, she has done research in the neuropsychiatry of Huntington’s disease and published seminal papers on the neuropsychiatry of spinocerebellar ataxias. Her main interest now is in the mental health aspects of Parkinson’s disease (PD) and she is doing a trial of memantine in PD dementia. She was the lead author on the first RCT of donepezil in PDD and participated in the recently published NICE guidelines for the diagnosis and management of PD. She has also served on the guidelines’ committees for the psychiatric treatment of Huntington’s disease and the American Medical Directors’ Association’s PD guidelines for nursing homes. Dr Leroi received her medical and psychiatric training in Canada and undertook fellowship training in neuropsychiatry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. She joined the psychiatry faculty at Johns Hopkins as Assistant Professor before moving to the UK. In 2000 she was awarded the American Neuropsychiatric Association’s Young Investigators’ Award. Dr Leroi was recently appointed a Senior Research Fellow with the Parkinson’s Disease Society and has been funded to study motivation disorders in PD.  She has also been awarded, in 2006 – selected to participate in NESTA’s Crucible program for early career researchers and in 2007 awarded a TRAM mentorship award for research proposal development.