On 13th September Dr Rachael Lawson was announced as a Movement Disorders Society (MDS) Junior Award winner at this year’s MDS Virtual Congress 2020 for her work “Predicting dementia in the first 6 years of Parkinson’s disease in the ICICLE-PD Cohort.”

MDS Junior Awards are presented in recognition of significant contribution to clinical or basic science research in the field of Movement Disorders and are selected from the top ranked abstracts to the MDS Congress. In 2020, over 1750 abstracts were submitted. Rachael and Dr Chencheng Zang from Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, China, who also won a MDS Junior Award, were invited to present their work as part of the Presidential Lectures series during the conference which was attended by over 19,000 people.

Rachael is a psychologist and a Parkinson’s UK Senior Research Fellow based in the Clinical Ageing Research Unit (CARU) in the Translational and Clinical Research Institute, Newcastle University. Her work is on neurocognition in Parkinson’s disease and her fellowship aims to improve the recognition of delirium in people with Parkinson’s.